“In more ancient times, when communal experiences were mediated by religion, crowds used to gather outside temples on feast days. … Nowadays, we have Apple Release Day – the Feast of St. Jobs – when faithful customers gather outside Apple stores and await the renewal of a next generation iPhone.” Says NYU professor Erica Robles-Anderson, “It’s so obviously a cult.”
Category: ideas
French Thinking Used To Animate The World. So What Happened?
“French public debate has been framed around enduring oppositions such as good and evil, opening and closure, unity and diversity, civilisation and barbarity, progress and decadence, and secularism and religion. Underlying this passion for ideas is a belief in the singularity of France’s mission.”
Notes Toward A Theory Of Hair: Siri Hustvedt Reflects On The Cultural Meaning Of Coiffure
“All mammals have hair. … We are the only mammals who braid, knot, powder, pile up, oil, spray, tease, perm, color, curl, straighten, augment, shave off, and clip our hair.” Not to mention using it as a signifier of gender, religion, and/or cultural politics.
The Collaboration Fad Is Hurting Introverts
“Just last week the University of Chicago library announced that in response to ‘increased demand,’ librarians are working with architects to transform a presumably quiet reading room into a ‘vibrant laboratory of interactive learning.’ One writer on Top Hat, a popular online resource for educators, argued in a post last month that ‘cooperative learning strategies harness the greatest part of human evolutionary behavior: sociality.'”
The Deep Moral Failings Of Those Who Would Ban Toni Morrison’s Books
“When schools and institutions attempt to ban The Bluest Eye there is a distinct and ugly irony to this exile. I often think of Morrison’s own words, ‘If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain.'”
How Will We Talk To The Technology Of The Future?
“They have taken that most inscrutable of interfaces — the Check Engine light — and forced it to explain itself. It can hear you, and speak back, all over the din of the open road.”
How Does Creativity Spread? Networks, Connections, Influence
The truth is life is not fair. For creative work to spread, you need more than talent. You have to get exposure to the right networks. And as unfair as that may seem, it’s the way the world has always worked.
Ig Nobels 2015: Insect Sting Pain Scale, Unboiling An Egg, And ‘Huh?’
“Professors, researchers, students and actual Nobel laureates from around the world gathered at Harvard University at the 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, the absurdist celebration of science that ‘makes you laugh, then think’.”
How Algorithms Are Changing The Way We Design Things
Explicit design is when “you have an idea in your head and you draw it. Generative design is when you state the goals of your problem and have the computer create design iterations for you.”
French Ideas And Philosophy Once Enthralled The Western World. No More. What Happened?
Sudhir Hazareesingh suggests that some of the French habits of thought that made its great minds so influential from the Enlightenment through the 1960s contained the seeds of their own decline.