“Apart from stress management, it is sometimes just fun to look back. Though this isn’t its main purpose, the app also makes a worthwhile memory collection tool.”
Category: ideas
Chinua Achebe Examined The Construction Of Colonialism, But Also Masculinity
“What sticks with you about the novel is its sensitive investigation, often through folk tales, of how culture functions and what it means.”
Wilshire Boulevard: The Main Street Of Los Angeles (With All That Implies)
“Wilshire has operated as a proving ground for new ideas about architecture, commerce, transportation and urbanism in Southern California. For nearly a century Wilshire has been L.A.’s boulevard of prototypes, a string of hypotheses 16 miles long.”
Why Do Scientists Seem So Obsessed With Beauty?
“Scientists have mused on beauty at least since Pythagoras proposed that the heavens conform to the same orderly proportions as musical sounds. But some kinds of science have in recent times presented a public face that seems to be turned toward beauty 24/7. … It seems that the more theoretical and expensive the science, the more they talk about beauty.” (Exhibit A: the Higgs boson.)
Religion Without God – A Preview Of Ronald Dworkin’s Final Book
“Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter.”
Touch Screen Generation – How They’re Changing How Our Children Learn
“Not that long ago, there was only the television, which theoretically could be kept in the parents’ bedroom or locked behind a cabinet. Now there are smartphones and iPads, which wash up in the domestic clutter alongside keys and gum and stray hair ties.”
Russian Orthodox Creationists Picket Moscow’s Darwin Museum
“Footage released by Orthodox activist group Bozhaya Volya, or God’s Will, showed activists unfurling a banner reading ‘God created the world’ on the building’s façade while others threw leaflets bearing creationist slogans into the lobby of a popular destination for school trips and family outings in the capital. ‘God created kittens!’ read one leaflet visible in the video.”
What Our Bodies’ Behaviors Reveal
“Ever wondered why yawns are contagious, you can’t tickle yourself and we don’t speak from our bottoms?”
How Technology Is Changing Teaching
“Our understanding of the mechanics of the human mind has deepened enormously, and this understanding already has begun to affirm much of what we know about what works in education, while also revealing new ideas and strategies for how to improve what we do.”
Are We Born Believing In God?
“In conversation with Muslims and Hindus I have been told that children come into the world already knowing God. This theme that children have special access to the divine appears in various traditions, but independent of theological claims, do we have reason to believe that we are born believers in God?”