Category: ideas

“Jane Austen wrote about baseball 40 years before its official invention, according to a new book. But evidence of the game’s British origins was erased from history by the American sports magnate Albert Spalding.”

The literature on overparenting raises a number of sticky questions. For example, is it really wrong for us to push our children to excel in areas where they are talented?

Berkeley professor Richard Muller, author of Physics for Future Presidents, has three areas where he wants our next leader to be informed and aware: terrorism (“beware of the low-tech”), robotics (“most instruments work better when there are not humans walking around and shaking them”), and global warming (“it’s going to get much, much worse… [most of the greenhouse gases are] going to come from the developing world”).

Anthony McGowan gets himself caught in a thought spiral contemplating the implications of such “humourisms” as “Q: What’s brown and sticky? A: A stick” and “There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who do not.”

“The School of Life – a new offbeat shop-cum-philosphy school in London, selling books, courses and even meals filled with ‘intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life’ – has this week launched a website devoted to aphorisms. Each day for a month, thedailyaphorism.com will deliver an aphorism to ‘discuss, dispute or distribute’.”

Jonathan Jones: “To me, the whole point of atheism is not worrying too much about it. Campaigning against God, making an issue of unbelief, is merely producing a mirror image of religion itself. […] [But] Religion, in other words, is mixed up with magic, or to put it another way, the kinds of religion that nurture art tend to be. Catholic idolatry begets beauty. Protestantism does not.”

“Sociologists, writers, lawyers and economists have begun to examine ugliness, suggesting that the subject has been marginalized in history and that discrimination against the unattractive, while difficult to document or prevent, is a quiet but widespread injustice.”

“While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s supporters have a better sense of humor?” Hint: Not the ones who are personalizing that hilarious MoveOn video.

“You recall George: in the person of James Stewart he stopped a run on the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan Association that would have destroyed it in the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ His predicament, with its eerie prefigurement of the present, provokes a closer look at the crossroads in which culture and finance intersect.”

“Scientists are now discovering that our political attitudes have deep roots in our biology. Our place on the political spectrum – liberal, conservative, or in between – is powerfully influenced by genetics, new studies show. In the past year, researchers have demonstrated that the brains of liberals and conservatives are physically and functionally distinctive, suggesting that people on either side of the ideological divide are actually wired differently.”