Can a madrasa that teaches children of suicide bombers to draw and dance help them get deprogrammed from hours and hours of militant videos? The school is sure trying, but “when they first arrived from Surabaya, the children shrank from music and refrained from drawing images of living things because they believed it conflicted with Islam, social workers said. They were horrified by dancing and by a Christian social worker who didn’t wear a head scarf.” – The New York Times
Category: ideas
The Real Problem With Cancel Culture
“The entire cancel culture conversation, including the debate over whether or not it exists at all, has largely missed a crucial point. While celebrities, successful artists, and other too-big-to-fail types can survive a cancellation (or even seek one out as a means of drumming up publicity), the rest of us are trapped in an increasingly deranged surveillance state fueled by the disappearance of our most essential resource: trust.” – Tablet
36 Pieces Of Computer Code That Changed The World
“We construct top-10 lists for movies, games, TV — pieces of work that shape our souls. But we don’t sit around compiling lists of the world’s most consequential bits of code, even though they arguably inform the zeitgeist just as much. So Slate decided to do precisely that. … The editors polled computer scientists, software developers, historians, policymakers, and journalists. They were asked to pick: Which pieces of code had a huge influence? Which ones warped our lives?” – Slate
Pinterest’s Audience Algorithm Is Awesome. Now It Has To Change
The company’s leaders say they want to map a different route to success in Silicon Valley, one that’s less meteoric and more humane. But in its first year as a public company, it faces a pivotal challenge: How to grow beyond a user base that has historically skewed toward white, suburban women without alienating loyalists, stereotyping newcomers, or potentially allowing for the spread of misinformation and radicalization. – Medium
Why We Define Ourselves By What We Own
With age (and lawyers), we develop more sophisticated ways of resolving property disputes, but the emotional connection to our property as an extension of our identity remains with us. – Aeon
What The Wild Success Of Silicon Valley Says About The American Success Story
The question of fixing Silicon Valley is inseparable from the question of fixing the system of postwar American capitalism, of which it is perhaps the purest expression. Some believe that the problems we see are bugs that might be fixed with a patch. Others think the code is so bad at its core that a radical rewrite is the only answer. – The Nation
How Curators Took Over Creativity
In fits and starts, the professional curator arrogated responsibilities once held by the artist, the collector, the historian, or indeed the critic, becoming the figure who assigned meaning and importance to new art: someone the art historian Bruce Altshuler has called “the curator as creator.” Soon after, the curator stepped beyond the single museum or institution to become a roving organizer and analyst of contemporary art. – New York Review of Books
Should People Have The Legal Right to Change Their Age?
If chronological age doesn’t matter, as I have argued, then people should be allowed to change this ‘age’ in their IDs to match their biological rather than their chronological age. – Aeon
An Artist Figures Out Why Mathematicians Just Can’t Quit Their Blackboards
Photographer Jessica Wynne: “When I was talking to [mathematicians] about their work, I realised that their thought process and what they do is extremely creative – and I never really thought about mathematics in that way.” – The Observer (UK)
An Historian Says To Be Wary Of Written History
Why? “People say: history will exonerate me! But history never exonerates anyone. In fact, this makes me very wary about the role of written history – how unfair written history can be.” – Irish Times