Category: ideas

“Prayer is religion’s hermit crab; it scuttles recognisably from age to age and purpose to purpose, while attempts to refute or confirm are left to grasp its shells. It endures, shaping the mind, altering the body, or reflecting and resisting the forces of modern life. In its irreducible variety and seeming gratuitousness, it remains a puzzle. But if prayer itself resists explanation, it can still be illuminating to map its dimensions.”

“Email has evolved into a weird medium of communication where the best thing you can do is destroy it quickly, as if every email were a rabid bat attacking your face. Yet even the tragically email-burdened still have a weird love for this particular rabid, face-attacking bat.”

Maria Konnikova looks at research into when – and where – children don’t accept an uneven distribution of goodies, even if the unevenness is in their favor.

“The decades-long assault on the arts, the humanities, journalism and civic literacy is largely complete. All the disciplines that once helped us interpret who we were as a people and our place in the world—history, theater, the study of foreign languages, music, journalism, philosophy, literature, religion and the arts—have been corrupted or relegated to the margins.”

It’s disturbingly easy to get someone to confess to something they didn’t do. (Especially if that someone has an IQ of 65.)

“The White House has asked President Obama’s former staffers to add context to past speeches using the online annotation platform Genius. The notes, on the White House’s website now, feature anecdotes such as what it was like for Jon Favreau to stare down a blank computer screen before writing the president’s first State of the Union address. While the contributions will be heavily curated, members of the public are encouraged to add annotations as well.”

“Ms. Sarsons discovered one group of female economists who enjoyed the same career success as men: those who work alone. Specifically, she says that ‘women who solo author everything have roughly the same chance of receiving tenure as a man.’ So any gender differences must be because of the differential treatment of men and women who work collaboratively.”

Increasingly the world around us is being modulated by machine. We’re addicted to our devices even when we don’t want to be. So how do we express and fulfill our humanity even as machines become more important?

Willa Cather said, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” But veteran TV producer John Yorke, who’s worked at both popular BBC (EastEnders) and brainy Channel Four, argues that even those two or three narratives boil down to one structure – one that lies deep in the human psyche.

“We can frame experience in two ways: propositional and narrative. Propositional thought hinges on logic and formality. Narrative thought is the reverse. It’s concrete, imagistic, personally convincing, and emotional. And it’s strong.” Maria Konnikova looks at the case of a prolific and persistent young grifter, and how she used narrative to disarm her targets and ward off suspicion.