Category: ideas

Writer Elizabeth Alexander: “Seeing is important, and helps you understand. But I think the repetition of that image without thought to who’s watching it and how it affects them is something that we could work on a little bit.” – The New York Times

Rather than stuffing children full of moral precepts and academic knowledge, the aim was to work with the grain of the pupil’s innate capacities and desires. Rousseau was one of the first proponents of the Romantic belief in the nobility of childhood, its freedom from adult corruption and closeness to the state of nature. – Aeon

It is a neurological event where excitation of one of the five senses arouses a simultaneous reaction in another sense or senses (the Greek roots for “synesthesia,” also spelled “synaesthesia,” translate as “joined perception”). Some 4 percent of the population experiences this kind of cross-sensory linking, and studies have shown it’s more prevalent in creative people.  – Nautilus

Long derided as a crutch, something we fall back on when the appeal of the present dims, nostalgia is a surprisingly sturdy launch point into the future. Not only does it ground us mentally and physically when the landscape shifts or founders, it focuses us, with sensory immediacy, on what we most value – and, by extension, on what we want to reflect to the world. That’s where its transformative power lies. – Aeon

We could try to salvage the order by constructing institutions that enable us to meaningfully govern it. But to do that, we’d have learn to do politics with people who are different from us. Can that be done? Probably not. And that means either the nation-states will kill the liberal order, or they will find a way to disguise it in democratic daydreams. The liberal order might not last much longer. – Aeon

“Social isolation has given me the clear stretch of time that Descartes says is required to do philosophy. Teaching has been cancelled or moved online; birthday parties have been abandoned; the spare bedroom is warm enough once I wrap a blanket round my shoulders. But disciplined reflection is difficult, and more so when one is surrounded by those who have a claim on one’s time and attention.” – Times Literary Supplement

Populism is not just a bull-in-a-china-shop way of doing politics. There is a theoretical tradition that seeks to justify strongman rule, an ideological school of demagoguery, one might call it, that is now more relevant than ever. – Aeon

It is common to assume that an AI could achieve immortality by creating backup copies of itself and thus transfer its consciousness from one computer to the next. This view is encouraged by science-fiction stories. But is it right? – Nautilus

The modern genre of pop cosmology began with the big bang of Stephen Hawking’s 1988 megabestseller, A Brief History of Time. Since then, world-class physicists like Michio Kaku, Steven Weinberg, and Freeman Dyson, who died earlier this year at the age of 96, have earned wider fame by writing popular accounts of fundamental physical concepts: time and space, matter and energy, the origin and destiny of the universe. – Tablet

The arts offer an evidence-based solution for promoting mental health. While practising the arts is not the panacea for all mental health challenges, there’s enough evidence to support prioritizing arts in our own lives at home as well as in our education systems. – The Conversation