Category: ideas

“The ability to delay gratification has been held up as the one character trait to rule them all – the key to academic success, financial security, and social well-being. … Which lends a kind of overpowering weight to the question: If self-control is so important, how are we supposed to achieve it?” Sheer willpower, it’s turning out, isn’t the best approach.

“The godawful commute. The fight you had with your partner this morning. The kitchen sink that won’t stop leaking. Minor annoyances? Maybe. But these little, everyday hassles can add up and may be as likely to do you in as the bigger, more serious stressors in life, like divorce or job loss, according to new research.”

Most people who use computers don’t know how to build software. Does that mean they’re digitally illiterate?

“Why is it a good idea that we continue to exist? Given that humans have caused the extinction of others, wouldn’t it be poetic justice if advanced forms of intelligence, which could probably run the world better anyway, caused our extinction?”

“For someone whose life expectancy is usually less than 100 years, it’s nearly impossible to imagine something so vast as geological or deep time,” says J.D. Talasek of the National Academy of Sciences. So he – a believer in the power of metaphor – assembled a group of 18 artworks to help get the idea across.

“Looking at someone’s iPod was like looking into their soul. In their music you could see who they were. You could tell if they were sophisticated or rough. You could see in their playlists the moments they fell in love and the moments they fell back out again. You could see the filthiest, nastiest hip hop in the little white boxes of the primmest people, and know their inner lives a little better than you did before.”

“One reason to take the Notebooks seriously, therefore, is to understand how a figure who inspired such a wide following could have held such views — and what this might mean for his legacy. This is a question of intellectual history and influence. While it is important, there remains an even deeper one: whether there is anything left for us to think about in reading Heidegger.”

“Futurists and science-fiction authors predict that genetic engineering will someday allow designer children, built to order, with whatever smarts, looks, and personalities their parents prefer. But biology’s new recognition of the role of noise in development gives us one more reason to think that this simply isn’t going to happen.”

‘Oh, wowww!’ she cried, ecstasy lifting her voice above the wind whipping off the marshes. ‘New brutalism! Rarely seen any so pure. First pressing. Cold pressing. Purrrfect!’

“The beauty of play is that it can take so many forms. So the river becomes this 51-mile-long blank grey canvas for the collective imagination of a city, of many cities.”