Category: ideas

Curator Cynthia E. Smith: “What the best designers illustrate is how to give form to sometimes very simple ideas. Good design involves bringing not just a fresh eye to problems but, most of all, listening to the people who live in those communities. We’re talking about a billion people living in informal settlements today.”

Hey, entire city of N.Y.: Want to meet up for art and dinner? Please Tweet yes.

If we didn’t talk about brands, we’d lose about a quarter of our conversation topics. But are we talking about what we think we’re talking about? Author Martin Lindstrom says probably not.

George Dyson, the canoe portion of “The Starship and the Canoe,” talks about ethics and computers and life: “We are all part of the living universe. So if we come across other forms of life, do we have a sense of kinship with that as well? We have seen where the lack of empathy with other living things can lead, and I hope that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past.”

Otto Neurath’s “system of reductive images, which portrayed people through the use of clichéd characteristics (laborers holding hammers, office workers at typewriters, farmers with hoes), were so easy to recognize that words were superfluous.”

“Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to ‘Anonymous,’ undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious.”

Who’s going to win all of our info – Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple? Farhad Manjoo says, “The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war.”

“The expansion of literacy, journalism, history, science – all of the ways in which we see the world from the other guy’s point of view. Feminisation is another reason for the decline. As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures men are the more violent gender.”

“How could a choice that is caused be free? Wouldn’t that mean that something made it happen? On the other hand, how could a choice that was not caused be free? If a choice has no cause at all, it is simply a random event, something that just occurred out of the blue. Why say that a choice is mine if it doesn’t arise from something occurring in my mind (or brain)? And if a choice isn’t mine, how can we say I made it?”

“In Niebuhr’s hands, the myth of the Fall from the Garden of Eden and the doctrine of original sin were enduring insights about the imperfectability of mankind. Unlike Marxism, liberalism, and fascism, ‘prophetic Christianity’ contained internal checks on utopian aspirations. And yet, Niebuhr believed that even as man was fundamentally flawed, he was ‘called’ to seek justice – not in the hereafter, but in the temporal world.”