Category: ideas

“As long as you’re ensuring they are smart, the people who annoy you represent the diversity you and your company require.”

Christof Koch of Cal Tech: “I’m not a conventional atheist who believes it’s all just a random formation. I believe there is meaning. But as you said, I don’t believe in a personal god or any of the standard things that you’re supposed to believe as a Christian. … This God I have in mind is very ephemeral. It’s much closer to Spinoza’s God than to the God of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.”

“We effectively have three evolutionary versions of brains in our heads. Our brains are rather like a city that has existed since ancient times” – a historic core (the brain stem), later neighborhoods expanding outward (the limbic system), and outer areas with modern office and techolopgy parks (the cortex and its lobes).

“While many find these disagreements disheartening, I will argue that they can be a good thing – if we manage to make them fruitful for a culture debate. Can we be sure that our beliefs about the world match how the world actually is and that our subjective preferences match what is objectively in our best interest?”

Daniel Mendelsohn: “In the nineteen-seventies, when I was a teen-ager and had fantasies of growing up to be a writer, I didn’t dream of being a novelist or a poet. I wanted to be a critic. I thought criticism was exciting, and I found critics admirable. This was because I learned from them.”

Easy answer: Fiction.

“But globalization is not uniform, and not always so kind. It can happen that a writer remains absolutely trapped in his local community, perhaps well known for a restricted group, but unable to project him or herself outside it.”

“Americans no longer expect or care about candidates making honest assertions in the public sphere. They no longer expect consistency and honesty from politicians, and the savvy political campaigner recognizes that there is no cost to making statements that contradict even their most well-known beliefs.”

“Germany is celebrating the bicentenary of the famous fairytales of the Brothers Grimm with a 600km trail that brings their dark tales to life in its castles, forests and towns.”

Amazon will start giving away Kindles – because the money’s not in the device, says Farhad Manjoo.