Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participants the study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. - The Atlantic
Smart Questions are, typically, kind of dumb. And, just as typical, questions that might initially seem dumb or underinformed, or downright unintelligent, are the smartest way to learn stuff if you’re a journalist, an academic, or anybody else. - The Atlantic
While there will always be a need for essays and written assignments – especially in the humanities, where they are essential to help students develop a critical voice – do we really need all students to be writing the same essays and responding to the same questions? - The Conversation
For Herbert Read, “culture” is capitalism’s breaking apart of life and art, and the subsequent fencing off of the poet, the architect, and the painter into separate institutions, giving politicians titles such as Minister for Culture, and making artists subservient not to the “natural” forms of life but the will of political power. - Jacobin
What if alcohol was not merely a vice, but one of the triggers that sparked the dawn of human civilization — in essence, the very thing that shifted us from hunter-gatherers to agrarians? - Salon
The new finding of Mr. Park and his colleagues suggests that investments in science are caught in a spiral of diminishing returns and that quantity in some respects is outpacing quality. - The New York Times
In recent years the idea that our universe, including ourselves and all of our innermost thoughts, is a computer simulation, running on a thinking machine of cosmic capacity, has permeated culture high and low. - The New York Times
We are used to hearing such petulant ressentiment, especially in connection with the 20th-century avant-garde in the figurative arts: “I could have entered a urinal in an exhibition, too”; “I could have painted an all-white monochrome, too”; etc. The simplest response is, “Yes, but you didn’t”. - Unherd
Escape behavior offers useful insight into the brain’s inner workings because it engages nervous system networks that originated in the early days of evolution. - Smithsonian
Mathematics belongs firmly within, not outside, the Modernist revolution in art and thought that reconfigured minds and lives. So why would any writer who cares about the origins of the ideas not wish to understand the intellectual core of arithmetic to the technological transformation of our world? - Prospect
Only connect: "The strongest predictors for people to maintain their happiness and health throughout the course of their lives were people who described their relationships as having satisfying levels of quality and warmth." - NPR
"Without professional historians, history education will be left more and more in the hands of social media influencers, partisan hacks and others unconcerned with achieving a complex, empirically informed understanding of the past." After all, this is the plan from the ahistorical side, no? - The New York Times
The experience had clued him in to something: In elite circles, not all opportunities were advertised. There were rooms that the rest of us didn’t know existed, and those rooms came with possibilities never advertised by the career-services office. - The Atlantic
Across broad landscapes of science and technology, the past is eating the present, progress is plunging, and truly disruptive work is hard to come by. Despite an enormous increase in scientists and papers since the middle of the 20th century, the number of highly disruptive studies each year hasn’t increased. - The Atlantic
Are thought, argument, and debate really dying? The picture painted in the media is of a horrified, unqualified yes. But it’s a big country out there. Is wokery crushing free inquiry everywhere? - The New Republic
