Category: ideas

“Any self-respecting young conservative knows the names you’re supposed to spout: Hayek, Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock. … ontrast, have been moving in the other direction over the last half-century, abandoning the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools.”

“In the beginning, there was the genome. Then came the foldome, the phenome and the connectome, quickly followed by the secretome, the otherome and the unknome.”

Introducing the Fab Four to a 5-year-old.

The island of New Holland sits at the center of the Russian city that Peter the Great hoped would be a “new Venice.” Now a Russian oligarch has created a mixture of contemporary arts center and something like New York’s High Line (organic garden included, of course).

“It now makes economic sense to convince the populace to live alone. Singles consume 38% more produce, 42% more packaging, 55% more electricity and 61% more gas per capita than four-person households.”

Sometimes, and counter-intuitively, it’s just flat-out too much success, and too much money.

“An X-ray diffraction and fluorescence instrument the robot uses to study the composition of rock on the Red Planet’s surface has found an application in an unlikely field: art conservation.”

Errol Morris: “Here is my confession. My quiz wasn’t really a test of the optimism or pessimism of the reader. There was a hidden agenda. It was a test of the effect of fonts on truth. Or to be precise, the effect on credulity. Are there certain fonts that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true?”

“We now know that optimism, just like pessimism, results from an intricate dance of genetics, life experiences and specific biases in how each of us views and interprets the world.”

“In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as the case may be.”