Category: ideas

Siddhartha Deb: “Without principles beyond that of pushing the boundaries of what one has the right to say – and without empathy and engagement with the diversity of the world in which we live – all satire can reliably do is add to a sense of outrage, the one universal quality we still have in common.”
James Parker: “Satire, to do its moral work, must itself be more or less moral. And the law is this: Broadly speaking, if it strikes upward, outward or inward, it’s satire, if it strikes downward, it’s bullying.”

“Over the course of reading and re-reading those 1,300 pages, I realized that he’d not only accomplished exactly what he’d set out to do, but also ultimately created the repository of a world which had long since died, opening a window onto Libyan history from 1911, when modernity stormed the Libyan coasts in all its brutality—Libya was the first country in history to suffer an aerial bombardment—all the way to the 1960s.”

Compared both to full-time and non-employed mothers, “the part-timers seem to be closest to the sweet spot.”

These mini versions mimic one or more parts of a brain. Since they grow and respond to drugs like portions of a living brain, researchers can learn from them in truly unprecedented ways.

Despite Gould’s split-the-difference approach – science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” – “The fact is that religion and science do overlap in people’s minds, in their life choices, in the difficult moral challenges society faces. To strictly deny the power of religion in the world, with billions following a diversity of faiths, is also terribly naïve. The difficult question that needs to be asked is why so many people across every culture need to believe. What is religion providing that so many need to embrace?” Astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser has some ideas.

“The philosopher Michael Ruse has argued that ‘morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.’ If that’s true, why have our genes played such a trick on us?” Philosopher William Irwin considers the options of what he calls fictionalism – religious, moral, or free will – and compatbilism.

Robinson Meyer: “On Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets ‘are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.'”

“Why would anyone spend thousands of dollars on a Prada handbag, an Armani suit, or a Rolex watch? If you really need to know the time, buy a cheap Timex or just look at your phone and send the money you have saved to Oxfam. Certain consumer behaviors seem irrational, wasteful, even evil. What drives people to possess so much more than they need?” But then: “Most people own things that they don’t really need. It is worth thinking about why.”

“The existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we somehow feel only the medium can allay. We are on the run from the anxious vibration of our living.”