Category: ideas

“HERadventure is one of nine recipients of the NEA’s maximum grant. It was created by filmmaker and digital artist Ayoka Chenzira, Ph.D., inspired by her attitude towards social issues at large.”

The official response to a petition for a Star Wars-style Death Star: “We don’t have a Death Star, but we do have floating robot assistants on the Space Station, a President who knows his way around a light saber and advanced (marshmallow) cannon, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is supporting research on building Luke’s arm, floating droids, and quadruped walkers.”

“Recreation may look like it serves no obvious purpose, but when dogs and other animals are having fun they are learning some valuable lessons.”

“Eating moss, kelp, weeds, raw shellfish, and dirt at Copenhagen’s Noma, the most provocative (and many say ‘the best’) restaurant in the world.”

“Underneath what appears to be umptebajillion ideas about who we are and how we work, the self-help movement has a startling paucity of theories about the self. To be precise: It has one.”

“If you’re a certain kind of amateur intellectual with self-improving impulses, it’s less vulgar to entrust your anxieties to a Cambridge- and Harvard-educated pop philosopher who speaks three languages than to the hearty exhortations of Tony Robbins or Oprah.”

Stephen T. Asma: “One of the more deeply engrained assumptions of Western liberalism is that we humans can indefinitely increase our capacity to care for others … But I’m rather doubtful. My incredulity, though, is not because people are hypocritical about their ideals or because they succumb to selfishness. The problem lies, instead, in a radical misunderstanding about the true wellsprings of ethical care, namely the emotions.”

“That sort of painful, sort of bittersweet, sort of wistful feeling you get looking out the window or driving at night or listening to a far-off train whistle? There’s a word for that in Japanese.”