Should we study the distant past to explore its strangeness—and jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one? Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn lessons for the future? - The Atlantic
It is a well-worn cliché that the practical person scorns aesthetic value. But there’s reason to think that it is the only way in which we can draw final positive value from the entire world. Thus, to the extent that we care whether or not we live in a good world, we must be aesthetically sensitive. - Aeon
Researchers analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of negative emotion words, like “hate” rose sharply. - The New York Times
One side uses the old canon as a punching bag and a scapegoat for all the evil -isms that afflict us; the other, as a monument to national glories and an erstwhile set of commandments issued from on high. - The Point
These creators understand that we are a species of storytellers, not rational actors. To speak to our irrationality, and tell these stories, they adopt an approach that has been tried and tested throughout history. - Wired
By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. - The New York Times
Questions of moral authority, the right to rule and the nature of a good leader are recurring themes in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Recent political events could almost be ripped from the pages of these four plays. - The Conversation
We all need to be able to take a step back and realize that just because we feel something disproportionately, it doesn't mean that it exists disproportionately, in reality. In reality, none of the changes people are being asked to make to make things more equitable are actually all that painful. - Wonkette
It seems reasonable to pose the question of art’s relation to politics in the context of the specific crisis that democracy seems to have entered within the past 10 years or so. The dominant intellectual responses to this crisis have, if anything, pushed the arts further outside the sphere of political relevance. - Aeon
At the heart of such suspicion is the assumption that persuasion is to be understood as an act done by someone to someone. One party is active, the other party is passive. - Psyche
Today’s boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time.” - The New Yorker
We got stuck with this particular version of nonbinary identity—singularly focused on pronouns, clumsy corporate integration, and iconoclastic affect—because nonbinary identity has become a brand. It is both a way of being in the world and an empty signifier. - The Baffler
We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. But viewing cooperation solely as a force for good betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. - The Guardian
Unless you think—and some philosophers do think this—that the large-scale future consequences of our practices don’t matter at all, it’s hard to see how the technical tools used to predict and quantify those consequences could be a poor fit for a book of applied ethics. - City Journal
