Category: ideas

“No may be the most important word in our vocabulary, but it is the most difficult to say well. At the heart of the difficulty in saying No is the tension between exercising your power and tending to your relationship.”

Jane McGonigal “designs games for a living, and she believes they point the way toward civilization’s next step forward. Her games are sprawling extravaganzas that suck in thousands of players and force them to pool their talents to become, essentially, one big networked brain. In the young and burgeoning genre of alternate reality games, otherwise known as ARGs, the players’ collective intelligence is applied to cracking codes, solving puzzles, and completing complex tasks doled out by almighty ‘puppetmasters.’ McGonigal is one of the people who pulls the strings.”

“Every so often, seemingly normal people suddenly walk out of their lives and disappear, with no recollection of who they are, where they are from or what their previous life was like. It is the stuff of fiction, but it happens in real life too. … On the fictional side is a play called ‘Fugue,’ now on stage at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York.” So what is fugue, really?

“This pro-playground vanguard, according to the child psychologists, designers, architects, parents and teachers who form it, is motivated by the conviction that play, in a larger sense, is under attack. High-stakes testing has elbowed recess out of the school day, video games keep kids indoors and sedentary, while parents, fearful of pedophiles and abductions, no longer let children roam freely.”

The world around us is getting noisier every day, particularly for those living in cities, and some in the UK are worried that those with the means to desert the cities are doing so. “Sure, there is much of modern life that is hugely invigorating: on a night out in our cosmopolitan, cultural and affluent cities, that great cacophony can seem like a sweet symphony. But an increasing number of our most accomplished citizens are finding it too much, and are opting out – fleeing to the countryside, or even abroad.”

In a relatively short period, English has risen to become the world’s dominant cultural language, whether you’re talking about books, movies, plays, or anything else involving language and culture. But as American influence and economic dominance wanes around the world, will other dominant cultures begin to assert themselves? Or might a return to local culture actually be a possibility?

It is a widely held belief in the UK that, while girls will frequently thrive in single-sex schools, boys will usually not. This belief leads to a noticeable imbalance between the sexes at many “mixed” schools, and some educators are left wondering what the effect is. “A study carried out last year in Israel offers some perspective. It suggests that a large proportion of boys in a class worsens the outcome for both the girls and boys.”

The ubiquitous typeface known as Helvetica turns 50 this year. Wait, wait – you only think you don’t care! “Helvetica is one of those typefaces that everybody knows, everybody sees, but they don’t really see it at the same time because it’s so good at its job. It communicates efficiently and quickly without imposing itself.”

“Laser scanners with arrays of cameras can create digital models of objects that encode all the significant bumps, cracks, corners and facets of real things. Computers can enhance, morph or tweak the models before shipping them to 3-D “printers” that may be halfway around the world. The result is a new version of the thing itself, but built from some resin or starch.”