Category: ideas

“Despite affecting about 5 per cent of people – roughly the same proportion as are dyslexic – dyscalculia has long been neglected by science, and people with it incorrectly labelled as stupid. Now, though, researchers are starting to get to the root of the problem, bringing hope that dyscalculic children will start to get specialist help just as youngsters with dyslexia do.”

“The first generation to actually grow up playing video games is turning 40. As a group, they aren’t in the basement and they’re not maladjusted. They are responsible middle-aged parents, and many are coming into the full flower of their professional lives. People who play video games (most of whom probably do not consider themselves ‘gamers’) are moving into positions of power all over our society, even in the White House.”

Now this is our kind of magazine list: elephants inventing water storage devices, mole rats making dust masks, owls setting out bait for prey, dolphins using sponges to fish, and so on.

“During his long reign [1587-1629] Shah Abbas presided over a flowering of Iranian arts in a style as characteristic as that of the France of Louis XIV. This was carried from huge projects to the most delicate and refined of decorative work… He was one of the great rulers of his age – the equal of the Ottoman Sultan, the Mogul Emperor or the King of Spain.”

“Although the box-office lure of skimpy fur garments cannot be underestimated, movies like ‘10,000 B.C.’ are popular because they appeal to our sense that life used to be more in sync with the environment. … In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called ‘paleofantasies.'”

“When you look at what people find attractive, it is consistent across cultures. We have some innate or hardwired beauty detector.”

“At a time when investigative print reporting is withering, through shrinking newspaper budgets and readerships, when journalism schools are turning out fewer and fewer investigative reporters for that reason, one could argue that documentaries are becoming our main source of investigative journalism.”

So why is it that the words we use to describe smells are the names of actual things with particular odors (rose, ammonia, hay, sulphur), while we have abstract words for color (red, green, light, dark) and touch (rough, smooth, hard, soft)?

“[T]he topic has been notably out of fashion in the scholarly world. Now, from the well-known historian Simon Schama, we have a new, contrarian view that looks at what’s unique in the American character, putting our past in the context of the election of the new president we are just inaugurating.”