Category: ideas

Seriously, this is a post compiling all the lists the internet has made about what to read – and it’s complete with links. We’ll see you back here when the archive closes.

“Some of the calls were quite tricky, and one of the trickiest involved the issue of obscenity. On one hand, Word didn’t want to seem priggish; on the other, it couldn’t very well go around recommending the correct spelling of mothrefukcer.”

“Creating hit television series, running an online supermarket, making smartphones: these are difficult things to do well, even for companies that specialise in only one of them at a time.”

“The algorithm mutates the image in different ways: chopping it in half, overlaying it on another image or randomly altering it. The resulting images are either culled or kept depending on how closely they adhere to the user’s initial stylistic choices, and the process repeats. The person can stop the process at any time and select an image they like, or let it keep running.”

“A new study suggests that schizophrenic people in more collectivist societies sometimes think their auditory hallucinations are helpful.”

“The current view of delusions is that they are the result of biology gone awry, of neurons in the brain misfiring, but [Joel and Ian Gold] argue that delusions are in fact the result of the interaction between the brain and the social world.” (audio)

“The world is faster, faster, faster these days. That’s the current reality, and it’s not going anywhere. Leaving a page that isn’t loading isn’t a character fault; it’s smart. You can get the information you were after elsewhere, and you can get it faster. If we really valued what we were made to wait for, well, we would wait.”

“In essence, they write, our minds are hard-wired to categorize information and create mental shortcuts (attribute A is associated with behavior B). This helps us retain knowledge using minimal mental effort, and provides a needed sense of structure to an otherwise chaotic universe. In doing so, however, nuances and complications tend to be discarded.”

“Like a scarlet sock in the load of white wash, insecurity has the irksome power to stain our speech and writing, interfering with the immaculate poise we’d like to project. Yet if you know what linguistic tics to look for, you can recognize self-doubt (and perhaps bleach the fuchsia from your pants before anyone notices).”

“Most people assume the western church shares the same creation story as Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians.” Not so: the doctrine of original sin is unique to Western Christianity. “The search for salvation from an inherently broken self has defined modernity as much as it did Christendom. The need for redemption has shaped the language of the market, technological innovation, advertising, politics and, most obviously, self-help movements. But what is new is for there to be so little consensus on how to find salvation.”