"The inner voice, which is also an inward-turning voice, tends to linger over negative content. What’s more, it can call our attention to processes that run more smoothly in the dark, deconstructing what should be seamless movement into a broken jumble of steps." - The New Yorker
If hygiene theater were actual theater, it would exist in the genre of catastrophic improv. Hundreds of millions of people are ad-libbing their way through a crisis in the absence of a clear script. That script could begin something like this: The best defenses against an airborne virus are masks, social distancing, and ventilation—at least until you can get...
His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention. To describe its scarcity, he latched onto what was then an obscure term, coined by a psychologist, Herbert A. Simon: “the attention economy.” - The New York Times
The internet is healing, I would say now, but we should all know better: a garbage vortex of such scale doesn’t just disappear, but drifts on, accumulating more and more trash, slowly choking everything around it. - The Drift
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once described play as ‘ecoming and dissolution, building and destruction without moral implication, in eternal innocence’ – as an act to be found ‘in the world only in the play of the artist and child’. - Aeon
In Springfield, Oregon, if you see people wandering around with choose your own adventure-style art books in their hands, don't be surprised: "Three writers, an executive editor and an illustrator worked side-by-side with local businesses and organizers at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to create the 51-page illustrated epic journey along Main Street in Springfield." - The Eugene Register-Guard
Warning people off doesn't work: "We hear a lot about inoculating people against fake news or 'prebunking' it, but new research shows that the best time to fact-check a false headline — and have subjects remember the fact-check a week later — is after the subject has already read the headline." - Nieman Lab
Philip Kennicott: "Inflammation isn’t just an actual symptom of the disease. It seems to be part of its etiology, its moral and social origins and effects. Covid makes bad things worse; it inflames things." - Washington Post
A lot of science fiction and fantasy predicts the future - so why not a well-researched movie about a pandemic? (It's worth noting that Britain's vaccine response has been one of the fastest in the world.) - Irish Times
In September the EU launched "an ambitious and historic initiative to fund innovative scientific and artistic endeavours to abate climate change and allow Europe to meet its goal of zero net carbon emissions by 2050. The Commission intends to bring the European Green Deal to life by creating ‘a collaborative design and creative space, where architects, artists, students, scientists, engineers...
The idea that the world is corrupt and unfair was the subject of medieval morality plays and sermons. They taught a vast population to reconcile itself to misery and subjugation by promising rewards in the afterlife. But in a democracy, everyone is moderately free and potentially subject to rewards in this life, though few receive the rewards they think...
In a recent study of 217 Border collies that ranged in age from 6 months to 15, the team, together with the Clever Dog Lab in Austria, found similarities with humans in the dogs’ personality traits as they age. - Nautilus
"Was there a connection between the sudden relevance of medieval anecdotes and an apparent increase in blackletter fonts on leftist social media? If plague humor was in, so too were ornate, eye-catching fonts derived from a Gothic style. And as platforms such as Instagram evolved last summer—becoming more text-heavy, politicized, and less about the passive consumption of lifestyle imagery—text-based...
"I think we’re witnessing, in real time, society grappling with the emergence of social media as a very powerful force. Experts who have been studying this stuff have been warning for months, if not years, that these types of disturbances could happen as a result of online platforms. And this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen social media...
“History is full of civilizations that have collapsed, followed by people who have had other ways of living,” Kirkpatrick Sale said. “My optimism is based on the certainty that civilization will collapse.” - Wired
