ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

An Ode To Procrastination

When I’m procrastinating, stalling, temporizing, I am defined at the metabolic level by the thing that I am not doing. - The Atlantic

According To Science: Characteristics That Make Us Attractive

Attraction is an instinct. While it’s versatile to some extend, key aspects of perceived attractiveness seem to be inherent to our species. - Medium

Is Culture Really Mappable?

Does culture really behave like space? If not, how are cultural relationships distorted when we convert them into spatial ones? - Cultural Analytics

Why Globalization Is In Disfavor

It is not globalization that has brought us to the brink of the abyss, but the peculiar strain of globalization that emerged in the 1990s—a system in which international financial markets would discipline the bad habits of democratic governments, not the other way around. - The Atlantic

What If We’ve Been Thinking About Intelligence In The Wrong Way?

Intelligence can be found, in part, in our brains, but perhaps even more importantly in our hearts and skin, in the architecture of the physical spaces we surround ourselves with and in the friendships we keep. - Washington Post

The Bludgeon Of History — And How It’s Defining Our Politics

Today it is not conservatives but liberals who are most sincerely committed to American history. Yet they too have evolved, perhaps even more dramatically, from their ideological forbearers. - Harper's

When Graphs And Charts Were A Revolutionary Way To Think

A psychologist and a statistician argue that visual thinking, by revealing what would otherwise remain invisible, has had a profound effect on the way we approach problems. - The New Yorker

David Brooks: Behold The New American Renaissance

Covid-19 has disrupted daily American life in a way few emergencies have before. But it has also shaken things up and cleared the way for an economic boom and social revival. - The New York Times

Is “Improving” Your Personality A Thing?

Maybe we should all try to become more compassionate or honest or forgiving, but there’s no comparable moral demand for shy people to become extraverted, or for excitable people to be more placid. - Psyche

The “Other” Brains In Our Bodies

We get constant messages about what’s going on inside our bodies, sensations we can either attend to or ignore. And we belong to tribes that cosset and guide us. Still, we “insist that the brain is the sole locus of thinking. - The New York Times

How Too Much Information Can Make Things Less Clear

Sometimes, attention can mislead us about the world. This is not to say that attention always distorts our knowledge of the world, but it does suggest that it might not be the unproblematic guide to knowledge that we originally thought. - Psyche

Of Course Networks Are Sexy Right Now. But You, Yourself, Are Not A Network

The network idea is so powerful in our connected world, that it's tempting to apply it to everything. But not to us... - 3 Quarks Daily

Eight Parking Stalls For Every Car: Here’s How Cities Are Trying To Change That

We found that the Green Code is changing Buffalo’s urban form in ways that had been difficult, if not impossible, under former zoning rules. - Fast Company

Tech Was About Disruption. Now It’s “Build Better”?

Taken seriously, the essay seemed to be suggesting an entirely new version of Silicon Valley: a movement away from making software to support existing institutions, and toward creating the institutions themselves. - The New Yorker

The Purpose Of Scientific Papers?

It’s enough for them to draw attention to an idea that is worth pursuing further—and an idea need not be true, well-justified given all our evidence, nor even believed by the scientist in order to pass that test. - Nautilus

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