Category: ideas

Noah Berlatsky criticizes the very suggestion. “Critical thinking is inseparable from just plain thinking. You don’t turn off your brain when you watch a film. How can my enjoyment of Roth’s essay be separated from my evaluation of what Roth is saying?”

“Several new studies exploring the effects of laughter are contributing to a fast-growing body of research that finds just how important it is to keeping us happy, healthy, and sane.”

“For decades, psychologists and social scientists have been studying conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. They have unearthed a lot of interesting data, and they have sometimes theorized thoughtfully about the results. But they have repeatedly run into a problem: The world they’re studying is not the same size and shape as the world of conspiracy belief.”

“In campus cultures where being smart means being a critical unmasker, students may become too good at showing how things can’t possibly make sense. They may close themselves off from their potential to find or create meaning and direction from the books, music and experiments they encounter in the classroom.”

“Business leaders like Steve Jobs who bounced back from embarrassing failure to reach their greatest success are a common American archetype, and a common motif for the TED Talk set. But in China, where entrepreneurship is a newer phenomenon and millions are only recently emerging from poverty, the idea that you need to fail before you can succeed is a tougher sell.”

“Social sharing is powerful enough to topple dictatorships and profitable enough to merit multibillion-dollar investments. But scientists are only beginning to explore the psychological motivations that turn a link into “click bait” and propel a piece of content to Internet fame.”

“Turkish archaeologists excavating a harbor site on the European side of the Bosphorus have unearthed a 1,200-year-old wooden object which they claim is the ancient equivalent of a tablet computer. The device was a notebook and tool – in one.”

“How to give mobile audiences the supertitle translations to which they have become accustomed?” Answer: Wearable tech – obviously.

“The universally recognized paragons of humanity — the Nelson Mandelas, Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Martin Luther Kings — did not organize their lives around self-fulfillment and bucket lists. They, no doubt, found a sense of meaning in their heroic acts of self-sacrifice, but they did not do what they were doing in order to achieve that sense of meaning.”

“Unlike educational TV shows, say, the robots are physically present and have some of the same social skills as humans. That gives them the potential to tap into a child’s appetite for one-to-one communication and help kids learn in many of the same ways a human teacher does. This is especially important when it comes to language skills.”