Category: ideas

“A new longitudinal study examined how college students slut-shame – and found that the practice is as illogical as it is damaging.”

The day, the month, and the year all have clear and obvious bases in nature, but the “pattern of living on a seven-day cycle – with one or two of those days set aside for rest – is a relative novelty. Only in the past few centuries, with Western colonization of most of the world, have the majority of human societies adopted it.”

“The Christian right’s Cosmos agita actually indicates a far deeper problem in religious conservatism – the selective acceptance of Enlightenment values. Religious conservatives have selectively adopted the legacy of liberal Enlightenment, from free speech to science, and jettisoned it when it does not suit their narrow ideological aims.”

For almost 90 years, fans of the philosopher have been agitating for his 1656 expulsion from the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam to be overturned. When that community’s leaders considered undoing that decree in 2012, they asked Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler for advice. He told them “there were no good historical or legal reasons for lifting the ban, and rather good reasons against lifting it.” Here, he explains why.

“When the creative self is unjustly maligned, it sometimes feels the need to respond in a way that might well be even more interesting than the work (or the meal) under debate. That might not be good for business, but it’s good for the cultivation of celebrity status. Heck, it’s good for the creative vitality of a city and its myriad art forms.”

“The phone has partly taken over the role of the baby blanket as a transitional object mediating between the self and the world.”

“Think carefully about your decision. It has been my experience that artists who create their own nonprofit corporate infrastructure have substantially less time to devote to art making”

“Watch a couple of dogs play, and you’ll probably see seemingly random gestures, lots of frenetic activity and a whole lot of energy being expended. But decades of research suggest that beneath this apparently frivolous fun lies a hidden language of honesty and deceit, empathy and perhaps even a humanlike morality.” (includes video and slide show)

“When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.” So one researcher may have worked out an unexpected way to break through.

“What I find interesting is that no such word or phrase exists in American English. … Certainly, there is no piecing together ‘shame’ and ‘joy’ to make ‘shamejoy,’ as in German. Shame and joy are antithetical, distant, never meant to share the same bed. That’s because schadenfreude does not square with America’s national obsession with the comeback story.”