Category: ideas

“Meditation is often credited with helping people feel more focused and energetic, but are the benefits measurable? A new study suggests that they are. When researchers tested the alertness of volunteers, they found that the practice proved more effective than naps, exercise or caffeine.”

“Ours is truly the age of awards. Prizes are becoming the ultimate measure of cultural success and value. In a time of information overload – of cultural excess and superabundance – our taste is being increasingly created for us by prize juries and award ceremonies. Art is beginning to resemble sport, with its roster of winners and losers and its spectacles of competition: the Oscars, the Baftas, the Brits. Indeed, the larger cultural festivals and prizes, such as the Venice Biennale, the Oscars and the Nobels, are consciously imitative of international sporting competitions like the Olympics.”

“What is it about dressing up that sophisticated people now find so off-putting? And who needs guests showing up at Halloween parties who are too cool or smug to bother wearing anything but black? Black is not a costume. It’s a downer. Say what you want about Marie Antoinette. At least she made an effort.”

“For the past decade, much of the Internet has been animated by the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ the notion that the tremendous masses drawn to the Web can together provide collective knowledge that outperforms even that of experts. By marshaling the knowledge and tastes of millions of people, the Web has fundamentally changed the way people can gain knowledge about their world.”

An evolutionary theorist predicts the human race will peak in 3000, and that we will split into two races. “The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the ‘underclass’ humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.”

“Grammar may have gone out of fashion in English lessons, but it is making a comeback as a weapon for fighting disease. Some short chains of amino acids have been found to kill antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Gregory Stephanopoulos at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues reasoned that if the amino acid sequences of these peptides were treated as a language with grammatical rules, the rules could be used to create new peptides with similar properties.”

“The clear bias toward politically motivated choices for the world’s top literary prize is a shame, because politics is overrated. Certainly politics deserves a central place in the consciousness — and conscience — of every thinking person, but to banish from literature all but the relentlessly topical is to impoverish the world beyond measure.”

Some artists provoke. It’s their job. But “Van Gogh’s murder, the cartoon riots and the violent response to the pope’s comments may finally have jolted artists out of their solipsistic cocoon. These days, it would be lethally naive to forget that art can unleash murderous passions.”

“Several economic studies affirm that the correlation of income and happiness is nowhere near what people think. One finds that in developed societies there is slightly more happiness at the 75th percentile of income than at the 50th, but that above the 75th percentile more money doesn’t matter.”

“It’s a rising concern for many potential donors to the arts: What is the justification for donating to the opera when the money could help stamp out malaria – or stem global warming, reform education or solve any of a number of humanitarian crises?”