“Certainty serves a powerful social identity function. Declaring a clear position, especially a strong one, signals belonging. … Certainty is rewarded not just with clarity, but with community. Ambivalence, by contrast, is lonely.” - Salon
And vice versa, of course. For instance: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Oscar Wilde all found some freedom in France, but Charles de Gaulle? He loved Ireland. - Irish Times
There’s “a growing wave of collaborative projects in which Latin American LGBTQ+ communities preserve and share their struggles and triumphs. They digitize photos, collect testimonies, and build databases of letters, personal memories, and other items that have survived dictatorships, censorship, and stigma.” - Wired
“Most people aren’t posting, arguing, or fuelling the outrage machine. But because the super-users are so active and visible, they dominate our collective impression of the internet.” - The Guardian (UK)
As ancient civilisations began to need more reliable timekeeping mechanisms, the technology took an extraordinary leap forward with the advent of dependable water clocks, which would remain the best technology available for the next 1,800 years. - Aeon
For many Canadians, play has migrated from board games or the rec leagues to smartphone screens. It’s no longer confined to the weekend or even to a full hour of downtime. Instead, it creeps into moments between work calls, while waiting in line, or during that ambiguous half-hour between Netflix and sleep. - The Walrus
Time in school is very structured around when you can do what. It instills the idea that kids have to memorize what the teacher is saying. This is opposed to a system that could be designed around the promotion of critical thinking, around promoting debate, around a much more student-centered approach to education. - Asterisk Magazine
hysical tasks that are easy for humans turn out to be very difficult for robots, while algorithms are increasingly able to mimic our intellect. Another surprise that has long perplexed researchers is those algorithms’ knack for their own, strange kind of creativity. - Quanta
Technique aims to bring efficiency to everything in life. Anytime we use machine logic and apply it to humanity, we are in the realm of technique. For example, we don’t refine our morning routine so much as “hack” it. We don’t make the most of a vacation; we optimize our time off. - Plough
The problem with the technologies of 2025 — household, work or personal — is that we don’t have control over whether we use them, which perhaps is part of why we don’t see Americans gaining any more leisure time despite the wild advances of the past two decades. - The New York Times
Basically? Only connect. "Our brains are equipped with a social processing system that is engaged in thinking about other people’s minds and helps us understand and connect with them — including people who have labored on similar causes before us.” - The New York Times
And it’s weirdly hopeful, deeply compelling stuff. “People were especially motivated to share their input when they were told that their contributions would be archived for posterity” (assuming the country & institutions, ah, survive). - Hyperallergic
Human beings with a lot to say like to make noise. So do crickets, dogs, mice, other insects, rabbits when frightened or being killed, moose, and many, many others. Some of their noises are effective. Some fail to have an effect. - Harper's
We imagine our choices are free, our selves sovereign, but much of our behavior arises automatically. We are driven by inner conditions, social cues, learned scripts, and neural flows—just as the machine is driven by token prediction and loss minimization. The difference, of course, is that the human brain is plastic. - Hedgehog Review
