Category: ideas

Some streets are pedestrian-only now, zoned for restaurants to spread into the middle of the street where cars once crowded. Though this design is new and pandemic-related, research shows “the city has a long history of considering audacious designs to tame urban chaos.” – Fast Company

What the lens of the Piazza di Spagna webcam reveals, in its own intimate way, is that so-called bucket-list destinations are, and always have been, real places where real people live. With most of the world locked down, these public live streams offer a new perspective; with the tourists gone, places appear all the realer. – The Walrus

Thirty-four million Americans—over a tenth of the nation’s population—have some college credits but dropped out before graduating. They are nearly twice as likely as college graduates to be unemployed and four times more likely to default on student loans. That’s a scandal for the nation, not just for higher education. We like to imagine college as an egalitarian force, which reduces the gap between rich and poor. But over the past four decades it has mostly served to reinforce or even to widen that gap. – New York Review of Books

“I could not help but wonder about the institution of the Western canon. Were my colleagues and I right to think that the institution to which we had given much of our professional lives could be reformed? Was our particular culture as teachers of Western culture compromised to the core? If it was, must we then, well, defund the teaching of the canon?” – The American Scholar

Part of what illness does is to unsettle both the sense of ourselves that emerges from our patterned and effortless doings, and our capacity to project this sense outwards, into the social world. In illness, the body as it is processed and experienced by others takes over and wholly penetrates the lived-in body, the body as it feels “from the inside.” – The Point

“What online services lack in quality, they make up for in convenience—and as they get more popular, they’re only going to get better, which in turn could unbundle the prevailing model of higher education.” – The Atlantic

At some point, from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviourally modern humans in a sudden flourishing of cultural artifacts in the archaeological record. So what caused anatomically modern Homo sapiens to turn into behaviourally modern people? – Aeon

By its nature, Roman civilisation seemed to unlock the pestilential potential of the landscape. The expansion of agriculture brought civilisation deeper into habitats friendly with the mosquito. Deforestation facilitated the pooling of water and turned the forbidding forest into fields where mosquitos more easily multiplied… The Romans were environmental engineers extraordinaire. – New Statesman

The word “scientist” first appeared in March 1834, while Darwin was surveying the Falkland Islands on overland expeditions from the HMS Beagle, being no scientist but an explorer, adventurer, observer, and diarist. The word began as a passing joke in The Quarterly Review. The wit who coined it was the English philosopher and Anglican clergyman William Whewell, and the context was a positive, though excruciatingly patronizing, review of a best seller of popular science by the mathematician and physicist Mary Somerville. – New York Review of Books

Only a public agent can speak in our name. So mass privatisation doesn’t simply shift decision-making away from public institutions to unaccountable, private entities; it also undermines shared civic responsibility and the very existence of collective political will. – Aeon