“The dictionary covers everything, not just words average people use in daily conversation. Among the new entries, for example, are drool-inducing adjectives like ethnopharmacologic and now-extinct creatures like the scimitar-horned oryx. (We’ll pour one out for you, Ory.)”
Category: ideas
Why Does Art Matter? Our Ideas About That Are Broken
“There’s no deeper pattern about the nature of arts organizations. Valuing art at the expense of community is a serious error, but that’s all. It’s not the tip of the iceberg, it’s a tiny iceberg.”
Decline Of The Public Intellectual
“A generation ago, political scientists were public intellectuals. We wrote lucid prose. We spoke to the issues of the day. We advised President John F. Kennedy. But now all we care about is math, jargon and one another.”
Could Phobias and Addictions Be Treated With a Pill?
“Drugs that work to boost learning may help someone with a phobia to ‘detrain their brain’, losing the fearful associations that fuel their panic. This approach is also showing promise for a host of other problems – from chemical and gambling addictions to obsessive nail-biting.”
But How Do Psychiatrists Treat Werewolves?
Yes, this is a thing. “In the psychiatric literature, the werewolf hallucinations and delusions the patient was experiencing are broadly classified as clinical lycanthropy, or lycomania.”
A Utopian Society – One Group’s Quest To Build A Floating Country That Creates Its Own Culture
“About six years ago, a group based in California’s Bay Area, led by the grandson of U.S. economist Milton Friedman, began designing and raising money for a floating ocean city-state, whose citizens could harness the sea to solve hunger, cure sickness and fix climate change.”
10,000 Hours Of Practice Can Let You Master Anything? Science Weighs In On The Idea
Different levels of deliberate practice can only explain one third of the variation in performance levels in chess players and musicians, the authors found, “leaving the majority of the reliable variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors.”
What They Almost Called The Internet 25 Years Ago
Tim Berners-Lee: Mine of Information, The Information Mine, The Mesh. None had quite the right ring.
Why We Can’t Stop Liking the Brands We Loved as Kids
Derek Thompson describes it as the Concrete-Mix theory of habit formation.
The Advantages Of Disadvantage
“There is this weird thing where having a little bit of resources is worse than having none. Or: having a few numbers of options is worse than having no options. It can be freeing to be at the very bottom.”