This is a thorough takedown of tote bags, media people, tote-toting people, and New York, with a couple of arrows aimed directly at Brooklyn. “the tote is a stand-in for being in-the-know. ‘Yes, after Bon App called Portland the country’s best food city, I did make a trip up to Maine,’ suggests a tote from Rose Foods, while a bag from NPR indicates how arts-friendly you are by supporting public broadcasting. Last year,New York Magazine quite literally ran a round-up titled The Coveted Tote Bags That Scream ‘Status.”” – Vice
Category: ideas
The Existential Fear Of Losing Your Online Self
The return of the paper diary may be at hand. “Contrary to what I’d like to believe, media that lives ‘on the internet’ is not actually floating above our heads in a cloud, like Mike Teavee in WonkaVision. It exists on real, physical servers that are owned by these tech companies. And, sometimes … things go wrong.” – LitHub
Want A More Creative Brain? Here’s What The Neuroscientists Suggest
Since the early 1990s, we’ve come to develop a more thorough and accurate understanding of what a brain engaged in creative thought “looks like.” The key, it seems, is integration: the firing of strong, lateral networks, connecting a diverse range of brain pathways in both hemispheres. – Fast Company
Lessons From The Naomi Wolf Affair: When Generalists Get The Expertise Wrong
“When is a writer erudite, a renaissance person, a polymath—and when are they merely trespassing superficially into areas of knowledge they haven’t mastered, imposing their own prejudices or yanking cherry-picked tidbits out of context?” – The New Republic
Intersectionality And The Meaning Of Culture
The term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. “Intersectionality” has, in a sense, gone viral over the past half-decade, resulting in a backlash from the right. – Vox
Some Rethinking On The Philosophical Separation Of Mind And Body
The concept of reason itself is built on a profoundly gendered blueprint. But a surprising rapprochement might be in sight: between feminists who criticise the mind/matter split, and certain philosophers and scientists who are now trying to put them back together. – Aeon
How Does Fame Fade Away?
There is not a definitive reason why famous people and media lose their popularity. One theory is that as new content arrives, it simply pushes out older material. Another possible contributing factor is that when people of a certain generation begin to die, the market for their work eventually dies with them. – PRI
Study: How Twitter Might Be Undermining Your Intelligence
The finding by a team of Italian researchers is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets destroys brain cells; that’s a question for neuroscientists, they said. Rather, the economists, in a working paper published this month by the economics and finance department at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, found that Twitter not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment but substantially undermines it. – Washington Post
Burnout Is Declared An Official Medical Diagnosis By World Health Organization
“Burnout now appears in the [WHO handbook] ICD-11’s section on problems related to employment or unemployment. According to the handbook, doctors can diagnose someone with burnout if they meet the following symptoms:
1. feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
2. increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job;
3. reduced professional efficacy.” – CNN
Want To Know What Is Art? Start By Asking What Art Isn’t
“What’s the difference between something that’s not art because it’s not good enough, and something that’s not art because it’s the wrong sort of thing? Let’s start there.” – 3 Quarks Daily