Category: ideas

Twenty-first-century tastemakers like to think of themselves as beyond highbrow vs. lowbrow—that monocle popped long ago—but our eye for subtlety persists.

“Caitlyn Jenner identifies as a woman, Rachel Dolezal as black. Why should one be legitimate and the other condemned?”

“It seems that every Halloween there are articles about why people willingly let themselves get scared by watching horror movies or going to haunted houses, but there is surprisingly little research about the people who are compelled to do the scaring.” Alana Massey considers the possibilities.

“How could you not think you were special if you, with the help of the king of France, beat the British army? You’re just these little nothing colonists and you triumph over one of the most powerful empires in the history of the world. How could you not get a big head about that?”

“The device is a cosmic ham radio—a direct, if fuzzy, line to the big Whatever that provides things when they are asked for in the right way. Radionics is also called psionics or psychotronics, and radionics machines ‘wishing machines.'”

“We suggest that creative identity derives its value, specifically, from a sense of rarity, specialness, and uniqueness, which causes a sense of entitlement (among creative people),” they write in the Academy of Management Journal. “This sense of entitlement, in turn, can cause individuals to engage in dishonest behaviors.”

“Think of rivalry as a type of über competition driven by mutual obsession, with the rivals propelling each other to spiralling achievement, and investing more mental and emotional resources in each other than circumstances would ever dictate on their own.”

“The capacity for self-correction is the source of science’s immense strength, but the public is unnerved by the fact that scientific wisdom isn’t immutable. Scientific knowledge changes with great speed and frequency – as it should – yet public opinion drags with reluctance to be modified once established.”

The idea of an “Ideas Festival” is so broad that it could mean almost anything and thus, to most people, means absolutely nothing. Will they be celebrating new ideas? Old ideas? Is the festival strictly academic? Policy-oriented? Does it strive to make “ideas” culturally relevant? Will there be award statuettes shaped like light bulbs? And so on.