“The web may have unleashed infinite possibilities of information and speed, but it still has to be absorbed, assimilated and considered by our clunky old brains if we are to develop any insight or understanding. It’s these last two which are now scarce, and crucially, what both require is concentration. The ability to focus, to persist with complexity and to consider ambiguity or uncertainty: these are the mental abilities we put at risk by flitting from one story to another.”
Category: ideas
What 15,000 Years Of Cooking Fish Tells Us About Humanity
It tells us that prehistoric, pre-agriculture humans were more sophisticated thinkers, and better craftsmen, than we had imagined.
Camp As A Reason To Live (As Oscar Wilde Lived Up To His Blue China)
“From a camp point of view, the choice between living for – what, honor? work? family? – and some exquisite dabs of paint on porcelain – i.e., a nuance – is actually quite arbitrary. Honor and lovely china are, in fact, fundamentally equal reasons to go on. … And finding a way to live in the world is never silly.”
Listen To Heavy Metal? Are You Depressed?
“An analysis of 551 college students found “significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression among listeners of heavy metal/hard rock music, as compared with non-listeners.” Furthermore, their underlying level of anger was not significantly different from their peers who prefer other musical genres.”
Crowd Psychology: Has The Boston Marathon Bombing Ruined Mass Public Events?
“Will the masses at NFL events do ‘the wave’ only in the watchful sights of a police sharpshooter’s high-powered rifle? Is tailgating before the game all but nostalgic history? Will major marathons be relegated to a dull repetition of 105 or so loops around a stadium track?” Probably not. But there will be some lasting ill effects, especially for certain groups.
When Camp Transcends Mere Good And Bad
“To Barthes, the neutral is ‘everything that baffles the paradigm,’ the paradigm being the conflict-based ideologies and associated choices that culture forces on us, uninvited and unannounced, on a daily basis. Here are some big ones: masculine/feminine, gay/straight, conservative/liberal.” Can camp really baffle the paradigm? Well, take Rob Lowe and Snow White at the 1989 Oscars …
High Camp Is A Serious Matter
As Christopher Isherwood put it: “You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.” J. Bryan Lowder’s case-in-point: Savannah’s own Lady Chablis.
How To Manage Your Online Life… After You’re Dead
“Google rolled out a new feature called “Inactive Account Manager,” which seems an overly sterile way to describe a system designed to manage the accounts of dead people/”
Bar Codes, The Universal Language
“Naming was important. Then the Tower of Babel came along and messed everything up. In effect, the U.P.C. has put everything back into one language, a kind of Esperanto, that works for everyone.”
No, Selling One-Way Tickets To Mars Isn’t Crazy
“It is about whether we are able to survive in a whole new environment–in a small community and a micro-ecosystem, growing our own food and building almost everything from scratch. In a sense, it will be comparable to what human explorers did in the prehistoric age.”