Category: ideas

“In real life, having your poetry criticized by T.S. Eliot could cause you to doubt your poetic gifts. But imagining it in a dream has the opposite effect.”

“Like [Garry] Kasparov before me, I now make a reasonable living as a professional human loser. Have rueful sense of own inevitable obsolescence, will travel.”

Recent research indicates that “it is better to make plans to fail intermittently – to splurge on occasional luxuries when saving for a house; to have a slice of chocolate cake when trying to shed a few pounds – than to end up failing anyway and getting so demoralised you give up your goal altogether.”

“Medicine has long separated burnout from depression, qualifying the former as more exhaustion-related rather than a clinical psychological problem characterized by chronic anxiety and feelings of sadness, but a recent study … indicates it might be time for us to rethink that division.”

“Generally speaking, sweepingly pessimistic statements about society should be taken with a grain of salt. … Sometimes, though, there are exceptions. … Ever since the 1930s, young people in America have reported feeling increasingly anxious and depressed. And no one knows exactly why.”

“Shakespeare introduced all sorts of problems to his characters, from falling in love with a man with a donkey’s head, to separating identical twins at birth, to meeting three witches on a moor.”

“Four percent of the total number of primary characters, meaning three main players in the 100 children’s movies surveyed, could be classified as ‘poor.’ In comparison, roughly 25 percent of American children live in poverty.”

“The digitization project, eagerly supported by Lincoln specialists and private donors, has so far found, annotated and published scores of thousands of freshly uncovered documents, adding to the universe of Lincoln materials. It began in the 1980s researching Lincoln’s legal career, then grew far bigger in scope as the Internet arrived.

Has the singularity arrived? “Google’s artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has claimed victory in its historic match with Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol after winning a third straight game in this best-of-five series.”

“In the modern age we can chuckle over medieval naiveté, but we often suffer from similar conceptual confusions. We have our share of phlegm theories, which flatter our intuitions while explaining nothing. They’re compelling, they often convince, but at a deeper level they’re empty.”