Aura matters, and for good reason. The presence of a historical object focuses the mind on it, its maker, and its context in ways that replicas, reproductions, and photographs of it cannot. - Boston Globe
Thinking hard makes sense if you want answers; it makes less sense if the highest reward you anticipate from your intellectual efforts is surprise. The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty. - Unherd
Young people today are no less obsessed with climate disasters than Gen X was with nuclear war. Where we had nightmares about missiles, theirs feature mass extinctions and climate refugees, wildfires and water wars. And that’s just the beginning. - The Atlantic
It is now difficult to imagine the mass of general readers—assuming they exist—being reached even by a historian of genius. Historiography is becoming stuck. - Compact Magazine
Yes, of course, but physicists have reconsidered the idea - and the cool thing is that “quantum reference frames might help resolve some of the weird paradoxes that arise in quantum thought experiments.” - Wired
For the teens at the time, "The thought was mostly like, this will be a fun little experiment. We'll learn some stuff. Maybe we'll bring the game back online for a couple months.” Now Toontown Rewritten has 2 million registered users. Will Disney try to shut it down? - Wired
“Starting at the strip club in Midtown and wending around the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, past the Parkview Diner, Coney Island and Brighton Beach en route to the mansion in Mill Basin that played Ivan’s home, you get a survey of high and low.” - The New York Times
Elite education has lost the trust of many Americans, in no small part because of how it solidifies the advantages of wealth. The fact that many schools still give preferential treatment to children of their alumni just adds insult to injury. - The New York Times
The problem is that we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. - The New York Times
Culture dictates human action far more than individual humans dictate cultural production. To understand great works of art as human achievements is just as backward as understanding the beauty and variety in nature as the work of divine hands. - The New York Times
No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship. But there’s another, equally vexing problem. We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. - Vox
On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being. - The Atlantic
This is a moment that philosophers have warned us about for years. Before his death, philosopher and neuroscientist Daniel Dennett wrote that we face a grave peril from AI systems that emulate people: “These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history … distracting and confusing us. - Wired
