Category: ideas

“I loved ‘perspicacious’ and ‘recondite’ and ‘hortatory’ and ‘cleave,’ the last of which meant the opposite of itself, both to join and to tear apart. ‘Impregnable’ was an autoantonym, too. It was like a snake that ate its own tail.”

“There is no physiological habituation to noise. The stress of audible assault affects us psychologically even when we don’t consciously register noise.” This does not bode well for 21st-century philosophers.

“Nerds, once the overlords of this inclusive pop-culture universe, will also take a back seat of sorts, standing in suddenly long, winding lines with reclusives and prom queens alike, everyone indulging in ‘geek chic’ and cosplaying as their fave heroes.”

“People are jumping ship from the 10,000-hour rule, including prominent economist Peter Orszag over at Bloomberg News and former professional cyclist Richard Moore for The Guardian.”

“Borders were his enemy of choice. Garry Davis was a lifelong promoter of the One World movement, which sought to unite all humanity under one universal set of laws that would be based on fundamental human rights.” The idea really was that without countries, as Lennon put it, there would be “nothing to kill or die for.”

“Just because psychoactive drugs with a large recreational following may help in some mental issues doesn’t automatically mean they don’t cause other ones. Except, a new look at health records finds, they don’t.”

A pair of Israeli architects, using the principles of their profession and of urban planning, “have spent years working on highly specific ideas for how policymakers could divide Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine without doing permanent damage to the delicate urban fabric of the city.”

For instance: laptops in the classroom do more harm than good, you can learn a foreign language better when you sing your vocabulary, it’s good for small kids to talk with their hands, and middle-schoolers (despite what they tell you) are not really good at multitasking.

“What compels us to tell the world with our fingers what we’d hesitate to utter in a room full of loved ones?”

“The latest findings from the real neuroscience of creativity suggest that the right brain/left brain distinction is not the right one when it comes to understanding how creativity is implemented in the brain. Creativity does not involve a single brain region or single side of the brain.”