“The recent burst of fictional resurrections of the Seventies — the most acclaimed novels of recent years among them — doesn’t just represent the establishment of a new consumer market. The novelists who have lately returned to the Seventies seem to be making a stronger claim: that there is something uniquely vital to the decade, and in fact uniquely to be missed.”
Category: ideas
The Strange Connections Between What We’re Hearing And How Things Taste
Turns out there is actually a science to the music or background noise in restaurants, cafes and grocery stores – and to why airline food tastes bland.
How Much Can You Trust Published Scientific Research?
“Has published research become less reproducible than it was in the past? We’ll likely never know, but the history of science is filled with examples of researchers arguing over the reproducibility of a published result—and then stumbling onto a completely new discovery.”
Everyone’s Trying To Figure Out How Our Brains Work (It’s Really Really Difficult)
One “danger that the big brain projects will have to navigate is the temptation to consider the brain in isolation. This has been a prevalent tendency ever since the brain became established as the “seat of the mind:” as the popular view has it, all that we are and all that we experience takes place within this wobbly mass of grey tissue. But of course, it doesn’t.”
How To Hack Your Holiday Memories
“What if we could choose which memories of the holiday season – or any season – will stand out most vividly and which we’re content to let fade with the passage of time? While it isn’t possible to do this with an exacting, sci-fi level of precision, it is possible to use some basic findings about human memory to increase the odds that you will remember that amazing New Year’s party but forget that Christmas-dinner squabble over Obamacare.”
The Mind-Hacks Of Stoicism Beat Out Anything in Christianity Or Zen Buddhism
“Only by envisioning the bad can we truly appreciate the good; gratitude does not arrive when we take things for granted. It’s precisely this gratitude that leaves us content to cede control of what the world has already removed from our control anyway.”
Before ‘Google It,’ We Had ‘Call The Reference Librarian’
“Here’s one salacious example: ‘I went to a New Year’s Eve Party and unexpectedly stayed over. I don’t really know the hosts. Ought I to send a thank-you note?’ asked a ‘somewhat uncertain female voice’ during a mid-afternoon telephone call on New Year’s Day, 1967.”
Fan Fiction Is Not A New Thing – But It *Is* A Great Way To Engage With Stories
“Shipping may have achieved prominence in the burgeoning world of Internet fan fiction, but the phenomenon, if not the expression, goes back at least a hundred years, when Sybil Brinton, a wealthy Englishwoman in her forties, wrote the first known work of Jane Austen fan fiction, ‘Old Friends and New Fancies,’ in 1913.”
Prince Charles Thinks His Ideas About Architecture Are ‘For The People’ – And He Couldn’t Be More Wrong
“Charles and his friends like to portray themselves as the underdogs, as victims of a leftie conspiracy of inhumane modernism, but they couldn’t be more well connected, and their polemics in favour of twee cottage architecture resonate strongly with a public taste for the picturesque and sentimental, and the spurious notion of What People Really Want.”
When, And How, Did Western Movies Embrace Hinduism?
“‘Look at the first Matrix movie,’ says producer Peter Rader. ‘It’s a yogic movie. It says that this world is an illusion. It’s about maya – that if we can cut through the illusions and connect with something larger we can do all sorts of things.'”