“A discomfort with the radical, or the confusing, or the challenging—with artworks, and lives, that insist on being otherwise—is very often what lies beneath the charge of pretentiousness. As much as it’s a way of deflating some apparently empty cultural gesture, calling something (or someone) pretentious is also a way of defending yourself against the uncomfortable feeling of not getting something, or—worse still—the uncomfortable suspicion that you’re being had.”
Category: ideas
What We Can Learn From Our Weirdest Dreams
“Dreaming is a kind of play in a set apart from space where ordinary rules of reality are suspended temporarily and we try out different strategies, we rehearse different kinds of behavior.”
“Creativity” Is Being Packaged Up As A Path To Success. We Should Be Dubious
When so much of the academy is given over to the study of creative minds; when revolutionary movements are so easily transformed into management lessons; and when liberals abase themselves before “innovators” and the “creative class”, one starts to understand why inequality is increasing at a gallop and why our leftish party seems uninterested in doing anything about it.
How The False Story Of Kitty Genovese’s Murder Spread All Over The World
“The murder had a major impact on people’s basic ideas about human nature – but it was based mostly on misconceptions and misreporting about Genovese’s murder … The soul-searching went on for decades, long after the original errors were debunked, evolving into more parable than fact.”
‘Co-Veillance’, ‘Intelligence Amplification’, And ‘Mules’: 20 Terms Every Futurist Should Know
“We live in an era of accelerating change, when scientific and technological advancements are arriving rapidly. As a result, we are developing a new language to describe our civilization as it evolves. Here are 20 terms and concepts that you’ll need to navigate our future.”
Just How Terrifying *Are* Our New AI Overlords, Or Servants, Or Whatever They Are?
“As they grow smarter and more capable, they will routinely surprise us by making our lives easier, and we’ll steadily become more reliant on them. Even as many of us continue to treat these bots as toys and novelties, they are on their way to becoming our primary gateways to all sorts of goods, services, and information, both public and personal.”
Look, We Have Google; Why Would We Still Need Citations?
“Now that we live in a world in which no text need be an island, in which scholarly publications are increasingly delivered digitally and so can be literally interconnected via links and embeds, it is reasonable to ask whether citations are still necessary.”
Distracted? It’s Nothing New (They Were Talking About This In The 1700s)
“The first time inattention emerged as a social threat was in 18th-century Europe, during the Enlightenment, just as logic and science were pushing against religion and myth. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1710 entry from Tatler as its first reference to this word, coupling inattention with indolence; both are represented as moral vices of serious public concern.”
Pretentiousness – What If It’s Really Authenticity That Someone Else Doesn’t Like?
“Authenticity is overrated – give me a perfectly struck pose. (That may be what authenticity is, anyway.) But everyone has things that set them off, and whatever we dislike we might choose to call pretentious. It’s not a stable category of behavior, really, so much as a versatile put-down, meaning, ‘I don’t like what you’re trying to do, and besides, you’re not pulling it off.'”
The Bohemian Mystics Of Islam
“On one level, it encompasses much of the popular practice of Muslim religiosity: it is an Islam of saints, miracles, pilgrimages … On another level, it consists of mind-bogglingly complex treatises in philosophical Arabic … [and] an unfathomably rich tradition of poetry written in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and many other languages.”