“Everyone has these experiences. We all see pattern. We see what we like, or feel spurred on by. Some of us see the lineaments of social life like a bright line connecting the texts of an archive; some see the hand of God, or serendipity, or conspiracy, or energy, or 11:11 on the clock more often than seems consistent with chance. For some people, such experiences become, for probably unfathomable reasons, the center of life.” – 3 Quarks Daily
Category: ideas
Images Of War: It’s Us, Where We Live, Work, Shop
Phil Kennicott: “Now the war has come to Walmart. And Hooters. And Sam’s Club and McDonald’s, and an unnamed but homey looking restaurant that has a $7.99 Lunch Special. If this doesn’t look like war, that’s only because we so reflexively resist the idea of a war on American soil that we refuse to see the obvious.” – Washington Post
Adorno’s Theories Of Culture 50 Years Later
It is hardly surprising that, especially in the United States, where the arts were expected to conform to democratic tastes, the demanding high Modernism of Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy has never received so warm a reception. Greater prestige was conferred on his one-time colleague Walter Benjamin, who, unlike Adorno, embraced the “dissolution of the aura” of the individual artwork that promised, via “mechanical reproduction,” to make high culture newly accessible to the masses. – New York Review of Books
In Praise Of The Civic Plaza
You sit in a plaza and it occurs to you that other people have been in your situation, whatever it is, and this knowledge is at the heart of civility. There are no answers, only stories—the answers keep changing, the stories stay the same for centuries. – Harper’s
Study Suggests We’re No Busier Than We Used To Be
The authors find little proof of increasing busyness among the population. Yes, as expected, people were spending far more time on digital devices in 2015 than they were in 2000. But the data provides little evidence that people now spend more time multitasking or that they’re switching more often from one activity to another, which might make our time seem fragmented and frantic. – Literary Review
Brain-To-Text: Neuroscientists Figure Out How To Decipher Words From Brain Signals
With a radical new approach, doctors have found a way to extract a person’s speech directly from their brain. The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how a person’s intention to say specific words can be gleaned from brain signals and turned into text fast enough to keep pace with natural conversation. – The Guardian
Walter Benjamin Believed WWI Changed Human Nature, But Culture Gave A Little Hope
It seemed like a good time to republish this, LitHub decided. “In their buildings, paintings, and stories, humanity is preparing to survive culture, if it comes to that. And the main thing is, they laugh as they do it. Their laughter may sound barbaric now and again. Let it. It may be that the individual will surrender a bit of humanity to the masses who will return it to him one day with compound interest.” – LitHub
Email Used To Be Amazing
Then it became a “productivity tool” for work, and “regular folks don’t want to organize their private lives as if they were office jobs.” But it’s not too late to save the technology, if we start now and proceed with deep reinvention. – The Atlantic
The Forbidden City Isn’t So Forbidden Anymore
After decades in peril – “Mao’s Communist government debated tearing down the complex, or creating a vast Soviet-style wedding cake palace opposite it.” – the Forbidden City complex has become a tourist attraction with restaurants, exhibits, gift shops, and more as President Xi Jinping makes “a broader push in China to protect and project the country’s cultural heritage.” – The New York Times
Science Is Having Difficulty Replicating Some Big Studies. The Question Is What To Do About It
A consensus is finally beginning to emerge: Something is wrong with science that’s causing established results to fail. One proposed and long overdue remedy has been an overhaul of the use of statistics. – Nautilus