Folk wisdom suggests that if you expect the worst, then you won’t be disappointed. This advice is pervasive; it can drive meteorologists to over-promise rain and companies to overestimate delivery times. - Psyche
The Boomers’ careers followed behind a glut of Traditionalists still in their prime. Disproportionately, the Baby Boomers never made it to the seats of power at the top of the business world. - 3 Quarks Daily
"The ruling shows how ingrained emojis are in modern culture, also that so much of our daily communication happens via text. The playful symbols and faces are an accepted way of expressing emotion, but they’re also used so commonly, they even show up regularly in straightforward business deals." - Fast Company
"The film set pub lay for a year-and-a-half in a yard on Achill Island - and when Luke offered to buy it from his brother-in-law, he was told he could have it for nothing. ... He already had a pub licence - ideal." - BBC
The second word in the three Rs of environmentalism is reuse for a reason, writes Rowan Moore of planned London construction. "The most sustainable building is the one that is already there, as the now-fashionable saying goes." - The Observer (UK)
The words nationalism and patriotism are sometimes used as synonyms, such as when Trump and his supporters describe his America First agenda. But many political scientists, including me, don’t typically see those two terms as equivalent – or even compatible. - The Conversation
France has long been associated with a specific version of the good life, from haute cuisine to haute couture. In the global imagination, the French excel not only at putting quality before quantity, but also in distributing the finer things more widely than their Anglophone counterparts. - Aeon
The identification of the present, not as a hectic shimmer of zeptoseconds but a series of temporal clearings where one might deeply linger, originates in the Buddhist concept of “sati”, understood as “moment to moment awareness of present events”. - The Guardian
About two million people call Mecca home, and while there are concessions to the city's sacredness — no movie theaters, no loud music at celebrations, and the malls are small by Gulf standards — Meccans live much like other Saudis. - AP
When did the so-called narrative turn—the doctrine of narrative supremacy—go mainstream? “At a certain point in history, people started saying, ‘We are born storytellers,’ ” the novelist Amit Chaudhuri said at a 2018 symposium he convened called “Against Storytelling.” - The New Yorker
The ideal of nature as it used to be before human intervention and before we introduced what we now call “invasive species” is one that Western urbanites created in the late nineteenth century, chiefly as a foil for their own modernity. - The New Atlantis
Remember when it was a sign of, like, total rebellion to blow a huge bubble on screen? Well, that time is long gone - and the pandemic has helped kill off what was left. - The Atlantic
Sure, you can blame ChatGPT etc., but: "The pressure to sell one’s race and race-based adversity to colleges will compel students to write like chatbots. Tired platitudes about race angled to persuade admissions officers will crowd out more individual, creative approaches." - The Atlantic
Fortunately, there is a formula to solve this problem without unrealistically suggesting that we dispense entirely with our competitive urge: Instead of always going for gold, shoot for the bronze. - The Atlantic
The study showed that "while people with higher intelligence scores solved the easy problems quicker, they took longer to solve the difficult ones, apparently because they spent more time inferring hidden rules before reaching the correct solution." - Big Think
