If freedom-minded people are to rid ourselves of “the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing” that Maggie Nelson believes to be menacing the left — from the MeToo movement to climate nihilism — we must learn to sit with ambiguity, risk, and indeterminacy. - New York Magazine
Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power. - The Atlantic
We need to think now of what happens when artificial intelligence is co-resident with us in the world. It lives with us; it watches us; it helps us, maybe interferes with us occasionally. We don’t really know. - The Atlantic
It is central to science, and its claims to objectivity, that values do not override facts. An important feature of this view of science is the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values. - 3 Quarks Daily
We found the same arguments used by anti-radical activists as they sought for years to ban from public schools and universities Howard Zinn’s best-selling iconoclastic introduction to the American past. - The Nation
The collector is the only one who decides how to arrange her possessions, ordering books by author, title, theme, or even (unfortunately) color of the cover — and they stay in the same places they’re put. That’s not true of our digital cultural interfaces. - Kyle Chayka
Screenwriter Tommy Pico on what that adds to the show: "Humor is a tool — a marker of resilience, a willingness to heal and to be productive in that. It can be a way to take the air out of a situation, to make certain things more digestible. It’s also medicine." - them
"How did a beloved Broadway musical — winner of six Tony Awards, including best musical — provoke one of the most widespread and united hate-ons since Cats? How did a movie marketed as a feel good, come-together story get branded 'manipulative' so many times it's nearly become a tagline?" Ouch. - CBC
The moral structure of work is up for grabs. And with labor-friendly economic conditions, workers have little to lose by making creative demands on employers. We now have space to reimagine how work fits into a good life. - The New York Times
Until now, scientists believed humans travelled south into the Americas when this ice barrier began to melt – 16,500 years ago. But we have discovered fossil footprints that suggest humans first set foot on the continent thousands of years earlier. - The Conversation
Greenberg had made it clear that the single most lucrative move for a modern-day critic was to announce the newest new thing, the coming revolution that would sweep everything else aside. And he had proven so influential that... - Ted Gioia
A perennial favorite of this alleged replacement of philosophy with science is the claim that, while philosophers haven’t been able to really get ahead on the issue, science tells us unequivocally that there is no free will. - 3 Quarks Daily
The Exponential Age is challenging our assumptions about globalization. A car can be designed in Guiyang and assembled in California with remarkable ease. But it also represents an inversion of globalization—a return to the local. Strategy + Business
Cited widely in science, but often misunderstood, for some it’s invaluable, hinting at profound truths about the nature of knowledge. For others it’s worse than useless. - Prospect
Thomas Mann was not wrong to worry over democracy’s tendency to enlist art for its own ends, and he was not wrong to call for artists themselves to resist it. - The New York Times
