Category: ideas

“Nothing is off-limits from the dumb hard sell anymore – even things that aren’t identifiably for sale. The long-lamented creep of commercialization has now crawled outside the bounds of commerce entirely, till real experiences and events have become promotional versions of themselves.”

“[S]ome respected futurists believe that humanity is at the cusp of a great technological leap. Given our progress in computation and the study of the brain, they think that a kind of digital immortality may be possible sometime this century. Upload your mind into computer memory and you could theoretically live forever.”

A team of astronomers has “found that a bright star which appeared over Bethlehem 2,000 years ago pinpointed the date of Christ’s birth as June 17 rather than December 25.” (Some of us always suspected that Jesus was really a Gemini.)

“We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends – that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.”

“Scientists in Barcelona have created a new musical instrument that will produce remarkable sounds, even for an untrained novice. But the ‘Reactable’ is more than a digital synthesizer. It might also point to a new way of using computers.”

We’ve been stamping out teasing in our schools. But why? “The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world.”

“In our time, we are perhaps less inclined to recognize science as a set of ideas with aspirations to universality precisely because the scientific enterprise has been so successful. But the authority we cede to science, both as the servant of health and as the master of knowledge, weakens our allegiance to those other sources of wisdom so crucial to our self-understanding and self-government.”

“Is there any difference between the modern pantheon of superheroes and the myths of the Greeks or the Vikings? The sheer richness and resonance we find in these fabulous beings – the darkness of Batman, the sensitivity of Spiderman, the purity of Superman – resembles the richness of interpretation and portrayal that has made the Greek myths survive into modern times. You can even draw direct parallels between the comic book heroes and the ancient heroes and gods. Superman is Apollo and, in moments of extreme action, Hercules. Batman is Achilles. Spiderman is Mercury.”

A psychology researcher theorizes that “when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve [in the autonomic nervous system], causing ‘a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.’ For the 66 million Americans who voted for Obama, that experience was shared on Election Day, producing a collective case of an emotion that has only recently gotten research attention. It’s called ‘elevation.'”