Category: ideas

“There’s a lot of, I think, social and even moral messages that can come from ghost stories.”

“Because of Watterson’s decision to avoid endless merchandising of his characters, we can only get our Calvin and Hobbes fix by digging out our books. We’re not saturated with Calvin and Hobbes in commercials or on toy shelves or at theme parks and that helps to keep the strip intact.”

“Designers are trained to focus mostly on the visual, but the science of design could significantly expand designers’ sensory palette. Call it medicinal urbanism.”

“Witches are a great allegory for any minority group that’s been persecuted and had to go underground and finally is like: ‘You know what? Dammit no, we’re fighting back.'”

“In an age as suspicious of greatness as our own, perhaps it is time to recognize that for all the perversion of the cult of genius in the past, it did preserve a sense of wonder in the face of human possibility, an exhilarating sense of awe at being–and being transcendent–in the world. We relinquish that wonder at a cost.”

“The lust to kill is somewhat normal, and cruelty can have some benefits. But the researchers who are exploring those sad discoveries are also working to bust up the vicious circle that offers these insights.”

“Only with the Revolution could a myth of revolutionary genius emerge, and with the propagation of that myth was born a possibility, still fledgling, but soon to be fulfilled: that genius might be used as the basis of political power, celebrated not only in death but in life, employed to justify an extraordinary privilege and license.”

In his new book, Berkeley neuropsychologist Rick Hanson argues that the human brain is naturally predisposed to focus on the negative (so as to remain alert to dangers) – but that we can rewire the brain with what another generation called the power of positive thinking.

“The free flow of information over the Internet (except in places where that flow is blocked), which serves us well, may serve others better. Whether this distinction turns out to matter may be the one piece of information the Internet cannot deliver.”

“One of the longest standing assumptions about the nature of human intelligence” – in particular, “fluid” intelligence versus “crystallized” intelligence – “has just been seriously challenged.”