Category: ideas

“The American Academy of Pediatrics is unequivocal: If your kid is under 2, no screens. For older kids, two hours a day, max. But the AAP doesn’t differentiate between activities; education apps, base-jumping videos, first-person shooters, ebooks, Sesame Street, and The Shining are all thrown into the same bucket. It’s all just screen time.”

“The design was intended to increase the power of ordinary workers; in practice it came to do something quite different, or at least that’s how it felt to many people.”

“The ubiquity of smartphones, and employers’ insistence that we keep them on, has morphed the traditional workday into something stretchy and inconsistent: Now, even when you are not in the office, you are very likely still working.”

“Not only is the delivery drone program happening, but according to the CEO, it’s well underway. ‘The Prime Air team is already flight testing our 5th and 6th generation aerial vehicles, and we are in the design phase on generations 7 and 8,’ he writes.”

“A photograph really is a frozen fragment of time. Not even the fastest, most gifted artists or the most sensually specific novelists have ever captured the kind of incidental realities a photograph dumbly records – the creases in the uniform of the last Napoleonic veteran, his paunch and sidelong glance and white whiskers – or the Brighton Swimming Club in 1863, naked except for their trunks and top hats.”

“‘Katie’s like a translator,’ said Jasmine Solano, 27, the featured D.J. at the W that Saturday evening. ‘She can translate artist language into corporate planning. That’s not easy to do.'”

Lucid dreaming is real, and likely more people do it than you (or they) might think.

Most adults have what’s called childhood amnesia (i.e., having few or no memories from the first 3 to 3½ years of life). “But it’s only in the past decade that [scientists] have begun to figure out when childhood memories start to fade, which early memories are most likely to survive, and how we create a complete autobiography without direct memories of our earliest years.” (includes audio)

“There is something almost akin to madness in how and when we laugh. It’s not as simple as a basic reaction to something funny.”