“Time, as it appears to us, is made of indivisible moments that are parts of succession… A single moment cannot have a duration. Something counts as a duration only if it is a temporal complex. We must perceive a change with respect to moments; otherwise we could not abstract the idea of time.” – Aeon
Category: ideas
Why All this Praise For Rich People?
“To criticise our praise for the wealthy and powerful as excessive inevitably raises the question of meritocracy. To what extent do we live in a meritocracy, and is that a good or a bad thing?” – Aeon
When Everything Is A Competition, Most Of Us Lose (How Did This Happen?)
Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite. – The Atlantic
Listen Closely, And You Can Hear Your Plants Talking
How close do you need to be? Well, this exhibit tells you: In May, an artist “planted a patch of corn within the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and has surrounded it with large yellow megaphones that visitors can stick their heads inside to listen to what a growing stalk sounds like. It turns out the sound is almost extra-terrestrial.” – NPR
The Toxic Campaign That Foreshadowed Our Cultural Moment (And Never Went Away)
The basics: “Five years ago, the ex-boyfriend of a game developer posted a bitter rant about their relationship online—and video gaming and journalism and American political life are still dealing with the fallout.” The details – about memes, swarming, doxxing, swatting, and so much more – infiltrated daily life in the U.S. for everyone from artists to politicians to the entire state of politics. – Slate
We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves – And That’s Determined By Our Age
There’s a lot of research now that shows that in the teenage years we develop skills from what’s called autobiographical reasoning—which is the ability to derive personal meaning from your past—and that’s really the key to narrative identity. When you start doing that in your teenage years, then that kind of opens up a Pandora’s box that says “okay now you can actually create a story for your life that makes meaning about who you were and where you’re going. – Nautilus
We’re Learning How Emotional Intelligence Drives The Brain
“With the help of neuroscientific and behavioural research, we are beginning to appreciate how the ancestral mammal brain is alive and well inside our higher neocortical systems. Unlike the computational approach to mind, the affective turn is deeply rooted in what we know about the brain as a biological reality. In the first decade of the new millennium, affective (or emotional) studies began to trickle into disciplines such as ethology (the study of animal behaviour).” – Aeon
Technology’s Impact On Friendships
The very language of friendship, for instance, is changing right before our eyes. Facebook has convinced us that “friend” can be a verb, often deployed in the imperative mood (“Friend me on…”). Apps have elevated the number of friends above the quality of friendship, displaying the tallies for onlookers to admire, one’s (envious) friends especially. As more than one observer has noted, “Friends used to be counted on; now they are counted up.” – Hedgehog Review
The Anthropologists Who Thought They Could End Racism, Sexism
Franz Boas concluded that “there is not one human culture but many, and he started referring to ‘cultures,’ in the plural. He was engaged in ethnography, and he believed that the job of the ethnographer was to disappear, in effect, into the culture of the people being studied, to understand from the inside what it means to be male or female, to give or receive a gift, to bury one’s dead.” – The New Yorker
Meritocracy Is Making Us All — Even The Rich — Miserable
“Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win. But what, exactly, have the rich won? Even meritocracy’s beneficiaries now suffer on account of its demands. It ensnares the rich just as surely as it excludes the rest, as those who manage to claw their way to the top must work with crushing intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their expensive education in order to extract a return.” – The Atlantic