There is no one past. There are countless pasts. Mine. Yours. The billions, or at least millions, of people who were alive at any given moment. The great, great majority of them never meeting or even knowing of each other, having no discernible influence on each other. - 3 Quarks Daily
The crisis really heats up when the algorithm’s structuring power bends back upon us and constrains us into thinking of ourselves as if we were algorithmic systems. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Part of the reason people are attracted to religion is that its rituals – the standing, sitting and kneeling in unison, the singing, the listening to emotionally rousing sermons – trigger the brain’s endorphin system. - The Guardian
Art historians may say that they do not need numbers. There is the art: you just need to look, think, and write. But that is to misunderstand the nature of knowledge. All empirical claims are probabilistic, and the only issue is how to make them. Scientists estimate the truth: everyone else just guesses. - Inference
Academic historians must now grapple with a new breed of students “for whom Paradox is the historical mother tongue and actual history is only a second language.” - The Atlantic
"In a noisy, high-tech society, it’s no wonder they’re all the craze, but it appears mid-century modernism’s cultish popularity has all but blinded us to the basic needs it was initially meant to address." - The Atlantic
Timing (and a relentless campaign): "After the bombast of awards season, it seemed fresh and fulfilling: a movie that told its story with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of heart. A movie that wanted only to move you." - Slate
Fourteen miles of fiber optic cable, 1500 lighting instruments, 14,000 PCR tests ... and a longer broadcast despite having fewer awards presented in full. - NPR
"Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn’t colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was molded by Paradox games." - The Atlantic
"So many artists have lived hard lives and had awful deaths that for years we seemed to expect this of them — that addiction and an early grave were a kind of tax levied on artists, most especially writers." - The New York Times
Let's talk about the film's use of music. "Though music is not intrinsically antithetical to deafness—deaf musicians are not unusual ... — CODA largely treats music as an exclusionary club for hearing people." - The Atlantic
The Dormio enables a limited shaping of the images that appear during sleep’s first stage. Yet this is enough to give bite to the question, to render it slightly less abstract. Why would I want to shape my dreams? What kinds of things can you do with dreams? - Harper's
The sceptical way of life, on Sextus’ presentation, follows a certain rhythm. You feel puzzlement about something. You search for knowledge about it. You arrive at two equally weighty considerations about what is happening. You let go trying to find an answer. - Aeon
What was the simplest task in the geometric domain — independent of natural language, culture, education — that might reveal a signature difference between human and nonhuman primates? The challenge was to measure not merely visual perception but a deeper cognitive process. - The New York Times
What’s curious about the brutality that fuels Internet shaming frenzies is that in real life—that is, IRL, in the usual online parlance—most of us would hesitate to consign a normal nobody to nationwide notoriety and several years of unemployment. - The New Yorker
