Category: ideas

If you look at the U.S., Canada is culturally similar, as is Australia. If you look at China, Vietnam and South Korea are quite culturally similar. The point, though, is that the world, culturally, doesn’t go linearly from the U.S. to whatever the endpoint is—Egypt, in this case. Those countries in between the U.S. and Egypt are not similar to each other because they fall in between them. – Nautilus

How does the once-unthinkable become not only thinkable but self-evident? How does the unthinkable become something we cannot think away anymore? To get at that, we have to tell a history not only of emergence, but of the formation of the deepest levels of our intuition. I have a strong sense that our best reasoning takes place at a semi-conscious level, and I’m very interested in how that lower stratum of reasoning — the intuitions that drive our thinking in philosophy, mathematics, and the rest — is established. – Los Angeles Review of Books

“If there are benefits to humans using data to assimilate this kind of information and attempting to make it actionable, the results have yet to impact the production-to-hit ratio of major studios in any meaningful way. That said, I expect that to change very soon as AI models trained to maximize engagement start to show up in video production departments.” – Shelley Palmer

Being in a bad mood can improve your memory. Aspirin helps not just for headache, but for heartbreak. (Hmm.) Indulging nostalgia in a cold room can actually warm you up. ‘List your blessings.’ (Thus avoiding the corny phrase ‘count your blessings’.) Being a ‘good-enough’ parent or teacher is all you need. Just don’t be bad. – The Spectator

First of all, kids’ shows now have merchandise baked in from the beginning – Paw Patrol being only one of the offenders. Then there’s YouTube, where many kids get almost all of their screen content. And YouTube’s advertising is relentless: “YouTube not only serves up advertisements, but also has unboxing videos, toy-review videos, beauty and morning-routine videos, and other seemingly homemade clips that feature young people using, talking about, and reviewing products.” – The Atlantic

Starting as a pilot project next month, Vienna’s “Culture Token” will track users’ movements—and their chosen mode of transit—across the city via an app. For each car-free kilometer the user travels, the app stores up credits. Once the user has stored up 20 kilograms of carbon savings—possible with about two weeks of car-free commuting—they get a token they can exchange for a ticket to various arts venues, including Vienna’s most respected concert hall, theater, and contemporary art venue. – CityLab

It is rarely acknowledged, by either the life-hack-minded authors or the proponents of minimalist design, that many people have minimalism forced upon them by circumstances that render impossible a serene, jewel-box life style. Nor do they mention that poverty and trauma can make frivolous possessions seem like a lifeline rather than a burden. Many of today’s gurus maintain that minimalism can be useful no matter one’s income, but the audience they target is implicitly affluent—the pitch is never about making do with less because you have no choice. – The New Yorker

The Left thinks of fairness as egalitarian “equal outcomes” distribution, and the Right thinks of fairness as meritocracy (i.e., the winner takes the spoils, the qualified take the reward). Frequently, these are incompatible notions of the good, and the tension between them may have never been more intense. But running orthogonal to the debate about fairness is this more obscure yet fundamental issue of favoritism. – Heterodox Academy

On this midsummer morning, 40 thinkers and activists have come together to challenge the core economic orthodoxy of our time: that growth is the most critical measure of human flourishing, an axiom that seems increasingly untenable in the age of accelerating climate change. The Hotel Belvédère du Rayon Vert symbolizes the very empire these adherents of “degrowth,” as the movement is known, wish to overthrow: consumption, wealth, inequality, travel, and cement, the whole modern industrial condition.
 – The New Republic