“Goblin mode” is taking the current pandemic-ridden world by storm. This state of being is defined by behaviours that feel reminiscent of deep lockdown days – never getting out of bed, never changing into real clothes, grazing from tins or packets instead of cooking... - The Conversation
The mass-energy-information equivalence principle Melvin Vopson proposed in his 2019 AIP Advances paper assumes that a digital information bit—used for digital data storage today—is not just physical, but has a “finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.” - Popular Mechanics
We propose that authenticity is a feeling that people interpret as a sign that what they are doing in the moment aligns with their true self. - The Conversation
Jefferson’s Enlightenment contemporaries fully understood. They accepted happiness as our greatest good. But only in theory. And theory, as they were often quick to insist, was not practice. - The American Scholar
“We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full range of academic work.” - 3 Quarks Daily
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
