Category: ideas

“What happened? How is it that, in only a generation or two, educated Americans went from at least pretending to know and care about the fine arts to paying no attention at all?”

Back in 1971, a group of Stanford students participated in a role-playing experiment, with some taking the role of guards in a make-believe prison and others playing inmates. The latter became so passive, and the former so abusive, that the experiment was called off halfway through. Most people concluded that the project demonstrated the darker sides of human nature, but Maria Konnikova suggests that the results were more about institutions and rules.

“What I wonder is whether justice and tenure can exist side-by-side in discussions of academic labor. At best, they rest next to one another uneasily. At worst, tenure is now reliant upon the stratified academic workplace to exist.”

A longitudinal study “found positive outcomes for families that used media such as TV, movies and the Internet ‘as a tool — to laugh together, to become informed, to connect, to spark discussion.’ Such shared activities led to greater levels of personal disclosure for adolescent boys, more positive family functioning for adolescent girls and greater parental involvement for both.”

“Once we buy into a specific apparatus, it’s awfully hard to leave it. Your cultural artifact is locked within that system, constrained by its programming. Notice how another user’s Instagram photo can’t be resized, emailed, or downloaded to your hard drive. It can’t exist within any other ecosystem than Instagram’s.”

“He used Esperanto while traveling when he was younger, bicycling between Esperanto-speaking homes in Korea. He used a free hospitality network, called Pasporta Servo, which lists Esperanto speakers willing to open their homes to fellow Esperantists. Pasporta Servo still exists today.”

“Juggling has probably been around since a bunch of primates let go of their branches and wondered what to do with their hands. And yet this venerable entertainment is being transformed out of all recognition by recent technology.”

Curtis Brown: “No. There isn’t. It might be a bit more complicated than that but not much. I was about to write ‘child molestation’ when I remembered the comic novel generally regarded as America’s greatest after Huck Finn (which, for its part, joked about slavery).”

“In this sense, a philosopher, academic, or any kind of writer is the worst person to ask about how to live a fulfilling life. Their obligation to themselves is not to resolve their own problems, but to plumb the depths of their own discontent, seeking after a truth in unhappiness. It is not likely that anything that can be articulated in an intellectually honest essay can bestow a fulfilling life on you.”