“Pay a monthly fee. Rent your object of desire. Return it when it bores or becomes useless. It’s easy, on-demand, noncommittal. Consumerism is being redefined for the mobile age, and the model is spreading among professionals and families in ways that were little anticipated, even by the venture capitalists funding this new era of cooperative capitalism.”
Category: ideas
To Make Good Art, Be Ready To Make Bad Art (In Another Field)
When a playwright gets stuck: “I listen to jazz, particularly new artists I’m not familiar with. I watch films I’ve never seen before. I go to museums. I read science or history. But if I really want to shake the dust off my soul and reinvigorate myself creatively, I don’t just consume culture, I make some: not theater, mind you, but anything else.”
Being Alive Means Being In Pain (Look! A Puppy!)
Humans deal with a lot of different kinds of pain, and our brains can learn to distract us from it, through stress – or something a little more pleasant.
Seriously: Trust Your Feelings (They’re Smarter Than Your Reason)
“Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a ‘privileged window’ into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information is often essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and random chance.”
You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Immediately – It Might Take Seven Years)
Rereading Marion Milner means thinking hard about desire. “We think of our desires as being pure and instinctual, never really understanding the influence cultural norms, or what we see on television or in pornography. We feel pulled toward something we consider magical and totally individual, and then we get our hands on it and realize it’s not having much of an effect on us after all. Why were we craving this again?”
How To Make Scouting Relevant Again: It’s The Technology, Stupid
Boy Scouts & Girl Scouts: The venerable organizations have lost thousands of members. But with badges for 3-D printing or biohacking, a virtual troop or an iPad app, they could adapt – and thrive.
When Philosophers Ponder Star Trek And The Afterlife
“Star Trek-style teleportation may one day become a reality. You step into the transporter, which instantly scans your body and brain, vaporizing them in the process. The information is transmitted to Mars, where it is used by the receiving station to reconstitute your body and brain exactly as they were on Earth. … But wait. Do you really step out of the receiving station on Mars? Someone just like you steps out … But perhaps this person is merely your replica.”
Technology – Will It Save Us Or Kill Us?
“Are our devices going to be markers of our rise to glory, or instruments of our eventual demise? “
Study: Does Wearing A Lab Coat Make You More Creative?
“The main conclusion that we can draw from the studies is that the influence of wearing a piece of clothing depends on both its symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes. There seems to be something special about the physical experience of wearing a piece of clothing.”
Is Black English A Language, A Dialect, Or Something Else?
“Kathryn Stockett’s dialogue-heavy The Help, the novel that was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie, caused a stir over whether a white writer should try to depict African-American English. But wait, what is African-American English exactly and isn’t it called Ebonics?”