Category: ideas

“The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university’s engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling. The closing will end one of the strangest tales in modern science, or science fiction, depending on one’s point of view. The laboratory has long had a strained relationship with the university. Many scientists have been openly dismissive of it.”

“In humans, information about the body’s state takes a slightly different route inside the brain, picking up even more signals from the gut, the heart, the lungs and other internal organs. The information on bodily sensations is further routed to the front part of the insula, especially on the right side, which has undergone a huge expansion in humans and apes.”

“Many influential figures have a cavalier attitude to free speech, believing that ‘dangerous’ ideas should be repressed. Disbelief in today’s received wisdom is described as ‘Denial’, which is branded by some as a crime that must be punished. It began with Holocaust denial, before moving on to the denial of other genocides. Then came the condemnation of ‘AIDS denial’, followed by accusations of ‘climate change denial’. This targeting of denial has little to do with the specifics of the highly-charged emotional issues involved in discussions of the Holocaust or AIDS or pollution. Rather, it is driven by a wider mood of intolerance towards free thinking.”

With a tiny bit of brain damage, a person could give up smoking: You knew it sounded too good to be true, didn’t you? Neuroscientists caution that altering the brain’s insula could wipe out more than addiction. The insula “helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.”

Women aren’t funny. It’s a stereotype that has been around as long as… well, comedy itself. But since there is, in reality, no shortage of funny women, where does the notion that comedy is exclusive to men come from? Comedian Drew Carey offers one explanation: “It’s not so much that women aren’t funny, he explains, as that men don’t want them to be funny.”

It’s so easy to be anesthetized by the bland dullness of mass culture that washes over us every day. “Hey, is it not time to, you know, get a little more serious? Reacquaint yourself with some hot swatches of substance? Tip the scales of intellectual lust back from blandly passive to deliciously active?”

It’s hard to imagine now, with the U.S. bogged down in Iraq and resented in countries around the world, but there was a time not so many decades ago that America actually succeeded in exporting its own values. In the post-World War II years, a series of propaganda films and economic incentives sought to convince Europe that democracy was the best path for everyone, and the plan worked. Today, “Washington is awash in people muttering about the urgent need for better public diplomacy, but the current administration’s attempts to reinvent it have met, mostly, with distress and sometimes mockery.”

Accusations of anti-Semitism have been flying with shocking regularity in the last few years, and while some of those accused clearly do hate Jews as a race, many others appear to have committed only the sin of having criticized the policies of the state of Israel. But the deliberate equating of the policies of Israel with the security of Jews around the world seems to be “alienating Jews critical of Israeli policies, who say the label silences legitimate, nonviolent opposition to Israel and that Jews should target hatred and discrimination.”

“During the last few decades a whole new form of residential segregation has emerged. I call it educational segregation: College graduates have become increasingly clustered in a handful of places, while large swathes of America experience a long, drawn-out brain drain.”