Principled disagreement can be a powerful force that tears apart a friendship. “These days, such principled disagreements tend often to involve ideas, and to be endemic among supposedly educated people and especially among intellectuals. The ideas themselves are as likely as not to involve politics. Even more than differences over religion, political disputes seem to ignite ugly emotions and get things to the yelling stage quickly.”
Category: ideas
Will Monet’s London Paintings Teach Us About Smog?
“Although we know that smog was a problem at that time, we don’t know much about it. Now we can potentially get real air quality information from a time when scientific instruments weren’t around.”
The Difference Between Men And Women? It Starts In the Brain
“Male and female brains are different in architecture and chemical composition. The sooner women — and those who love them — accept and appreciate how those neurological differences shape female behavior, the better we can all get along. Start with why women prefer to talk about their feelings, while men prefer to meditate on sex…”
Reconstructing A Document Of The Ancient World
“Previously hidden writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being uncovered with powerful X-ray beams nearly 800 years after a Christian monk scrubbed off the text and wrote over it with prayers.”
The Last Word
John Updike writes that interest in the last words of great artists seems to have waned. But there is much to learn from the last utterances of the great…
Your Brain As A Computer
Scientists are building a microcomputer meant to mimic functions of the human brain. “The Spinnaker — short for ‘spiking neural network architecture’ — system will not only help scientists better understand the complex interactions of brain cells, but it could also lead to fault-tolerant computers that, like the brain, work despite malfunctions in tiny circuits.”
The Good Kind Of Clutter
Music snobs have always been famously opposed to the ever-increasing daily load of aural clutter in the modern world, preferring silence to background music, and talking in lofty tones of how all this focus on “multitasking” is really just an excuse not to listen deeply. But at least one expert says that our growing ability to focus while shutting out any number of layers of clutter is a sign that all the disruptions are good for our brains.
Branding As Countercultural Creativity
“Manufactured commodities are an artistic medium? Branding is a form of personal expression? Indie businesses are a means of dropping out? Turning your lifestyle into a business is rebellious?” For thousands of young people, the answer is yes. “Many of them clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream — but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression.”
Does Religious Education Undermine Western Society?
Education is always a touchy subject, and with the world embroiled in any number of religion-based conflicts, religious schools are suddenly a controversial topic in Britain. Some are even suggesting that faith-based education should be abolished altogether. “Unless all faith schools are abolished, Britain will never be truly egalitarian, nor will our multi-ethnic society be secure enough to be worth celebrating.”
Everyone Knows Teletubbies Are More Evil Than Sex, Anyway
Earlier this week, PBS’s Sprout Channel (TV for the under-5 set) dismissed one of its most popular hosts for the heinous crime of having once used a few curse words in a satirical sketch about sex that is now available online. Mark Morford cannot believe we’ve come to this: “What sort of people are we? What sort of warped and reckless and utterly silly value system do we suck on in this culture? Why are we so wildly, preternaturally terrified of all things sexual while at the same time drawn to it all like fat teenagers to french fries?”