Jenna Wortham: “Facebook, which can be seen as a kind of social census, now offers nearly 60 different gender options … Plainly, we are in the midst of a profoundly exhilarating revolution. And ‘queer’ has come to serve as a linguistic catchall for this broadening spectrum of identities, so much so that people who consider themselves straight, but reject heteronormativity, might even call themselves queer. But when everyone can be queer, is anyone?”
Category: ideas
How Did ‘All Lives Matter’ Come To Oppose ‘Black Lives Matter’?
Linguistic philosopher Ian Olasov: “I think the philosophy of language can help us understand what’s going on, and what I’ve found in some of my research on moral slogans might shed a unique kind of light on the issue.”
Why Are There So Few Pokémon Go Locations In Black Neighborhoods?
Pokemon is also heavily tilted toward cities, not small towns and rural areas. But why? Turns out history is the reason.
The First Coup Foiled By FaceTime And Text Message?
“Honorable Turkish nation, claim democracy and peace: I am calling you to the streets against this action of a narrow cadre that has fallen against the Turkish nation. Claim the state, claim the nation.”
The Sliding Value Of Facts In A Social Media-Saturated World
“We are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob. What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth.”
Ragers And Tantrum-Throwers Now Have A Diagnosis In The DSM Because Their Brains Are Wired That Way
“Given enough frustration, it’s normal and healthy to get angry. But for a subset of the U.S. population – some 7 percent of adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health – the propensity to fly off the handle is so great that they can be professionally diagnosed with ‘Intermittent Explosive Disorder,’ or IED.” (Yes, IED as in improvised explosive device.)
Freud Was Right About A Few Things, Says Neuroscience
“While Freud’s concept of the superego played a more ethical role, encouraging the id and ego to follow moral rules, [the] Id-Ego-Superego structure roughly matches onto the Unconscious-Conscious-Metacognition structure of the mind studied in neuroscience today.”
We Assume Meritocracy Is The Proper Order Of The World (But What If It’s Not?)
“The basic idea—that we should rank candidates for power according to some desirable quality, then pick the best of them—seems too obvious to have needed inventing, but invented it was, and (at least in the West) not so long ago. If we go back to the occasion of its first appearance in the English-speaking world, we will find a group of men who opposed it, not just because they did not think it would work in practice, but because they disagreed with it in principle.”
How To Figure Out When The Widsom Of Crowds Isn’t So Wise
“Metaknowledge functions as a powerful bullshit detector. It can separate crowd members who actually know something from those who are guessing wildly or just parroting what everyone else says.” It can also function, writes George Musser, as a “lie detector” and/or a “truth serum.”
Looking For Brain Fitness? It Takes More Than Simple Games
One study, “financed by the National Institutes of Health, suggests that cognitive training that uses thinking, such as problem solving and learning, like reading a newspaper article and discussing it with a friend, has staying power in the brain — even 10 years after the training ends.”