Category: ideas

“Even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.”

“The police station Gang envisions would be more like a town center than a fortress. A gym, open to the public as well as the police, would rise across the street. Cops, teachers and firefighters would live in nearby housing. Some of the parking lots around the station would be transformed into parks. The idea is to have police rub shoulders with residents, building bonds of trust.”

It was once considered unbecoming, or annoying itself, to moan publicly about trifling personal ordeals. Now, in a seismic shift for the moral culture, abetted by technology, we tolerate and even encourage the “microcomplaint”: the petty, petulant kvetch about the quotidian.

“Everyone else seems to think Taylor Swift sings ‘got a long list of ex-lovers’ in her single ‘Blank Space,’ and yet you are pretty sure she is actually saying something about lonely Starbucks lovers. This, as it turns out, is a great example of something linguists call a mondegreen …” (animation)

“We might need these difficult thoughts unpacked by interpreters and, since these are usually less gifted than the original authors, they might differ on the correct reading. But then, if a clear interpretation of the ideas can be provided, why didn’t the original authors do it themselves? Such a failure of communication is a defect rather than a virtue. Skilled writers shouldn’t need interpreters to patch up holes in their texts.”

“Around 2010, casual Internet users were introduced to the idea that the digital world around them could be understood in terms of the ‘cloud.’ As a metaphor, the cloud seems easy to grasp: our data is somewhere in the ether, floating, drifting and wireless, available wherever and whenever we need it. … [Yet] how did we come to place our faith in a symbol that is so ephemeral – all vapor and crystal?”

“In the past few years, multiple fMRI studies, including a seminal one conducted at Stanford University, have peered into the brains of gamers. Their results show that when we play video games, two regions of the brain are continually hyperstimulated: the region most associated with motivation and goal-orientation (often referred to as “the reward pathways”) and the region most associated with learning and memory (the hippocampus).”

“Psychologists have argued there are two types of decision-making styles: There are maximizers, and then there are satisficers. Maximizers are concerned with making the very best decision, hemming and hawing and hemming some more until they’ve considered every possible option. Satisficers, on the other hand, know what they want, and once they find an option that meets their criteria, they pick that and move on with their lives. It’s a ‘nothing but the best’ versus an ‘eh, good enough’ mind-set.” (includes quiz)

It’s the question asked in frustration by every international traveler with an appliance. The answer, ultimately, goes back to the old rivalry between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

“As we head toward 2025 the role of work in society could hardly appear more different. Either people have been increasingly sucked into a vortex of punishing, oppressive work that absorbs many more hours than the standard 40 per week, or they have been excluded from any possibility of jobs that provide decent livelihoods.”