Category: ideas

“To say that a murderer has killed because she or he is evil is really to point to an absence of motive. Far from the usual muddle of human motivation, evil has a cold, horrifying purity. Phrases like ‘unthinkable evil’ or ‘unspeakable evil’ highlight the way the word is used to say the unsayable, to explain the inexplicable. So how can we think about evil?”

“Augustine’s radical answer to this question is that evil does not actually come from anywhere. Rejecting the idea that evil is a positive force, he argues that it is merely a ‘name for nothing other than the absence of good’. At first glance this looks like a philosophical sleight of hand. Augustine might try to define evil out of existence, but this cannot diminish the reality of the pain, suffering and cruelty that prompt the question.”

“The continuities of geography are striking. But the discontinuities produced by thought are more striking still.”

“When you get a juvenile delinquent to buy into something like this, that’s a breakthrough. I’ve seen these kids go from reading 30 words a minute to three or four times that.”

“But why do ideology and geography cluster so predictably? Why, if you know a person’s position [against] gay marriage, can you predict that he or she will want to increase the military budget and decrease the tax rate, and is more likely to hail from Wyoming or Georgia than from Minnesota or Vermont?” Consider how the US was settled …

“[Of] the staggering array of verbiage we’ve developed for tracking styles of art and our responses to them, these unassuming, conversational words are some of those that speak most directly to ‘everyday practices of production, circulation, and consumption’ [of culture].”

“Long before the Incas walked the peaks and valleys of Peru in the 15th and 16th centuries, … the Wari reigned over land stretching from the highlands of central Peru, centered near the present-day city of Ayacucho, to the Pacific coastal zones below. … [They] were to the Inca as the Greeks were to the Romans.”

“The world’s oldest undeciphered writing system is close to being cracked thanks to a new technology and online crowdsourcing, Oxford University researchers have announced. Called proto-Elamite, the writing has its roots in what is now Iran and dates from 3,200 to 3,000 B.C. So far, the 5,000-year-old writing has defied any effort to decode its symbols impressed on clay tablets.”

“Technology enables digitally mediated self-policing: the reputation systems and monitoring tools that dramatically smooth the safety and friction of peer-to-peer transacting parties without requiring centralized intervention, and which are now creating distributed digital institutions that reduce the need for government oversight.”

“‘This is your brain on Jane Austen,’ rang the headline [on the Standofrd University study]. Oh, no, not another one, went my head. … This one, however, proved to be different. It’s not about your brain on Jane Austen. Not really. It’s about a far more interesting question: can our brains pay close attention in different ways?”