"What we don’t know — about the lives of our neighbors and fellow citizens and why they think the way they do — is almost as important as what we do know." - The New York Times
In New York, the arts' elitism "stands in stark contrast to the middle decades of the 20th century, when the city was a haven for cash-strapped artists and New Yorkers across the income spectrum could make and enjoy a wide range of art." - New York Daily News
"Stories about slavery for children must do more than transmit information about the past. These stories have a reparative function—they must also humanize and liberate. These stories must uplift, hope, and heal while presenting the truth of slavery’s echoes in the present." - Slate
Did cultural movements in art fertilize scientific breakthroughs? It’s an intriguing correlation, perhaps not much more. But it underscores the point that one culture, not two, inspires scientists and artists in their times. - Nautilus
The development that really established the seven-day week as insurmountable, David Henkin contends, came in the middle of the twentieth century: the television schedule. - The New Yorker
Technoboosts include brain stimulation, which uses electric currents or other means to directly target certain brain areas and change their behavior, and synthetic psychedelics, which are lab-created versions of drugs such as ayahuasca. - Vox
Sleep’s benefits extend far beyond the brain, and that muscles, the immune system, and the gut can all have a say in when and how sleep occurs. That work “might change our focus from studying sleep’s role in complex cognitive processes to how it impacts basic cellular function.” - Science
Of course, anxiety never went away. Depression might have seemed ubiquitous, but people in the late 20th century hardly had less to be anxious about or more to be depressed about. - Psyche
Gaius Musonius Rufus wrote plainly, "If then men and women are born with the same virtues, the same type of training and education must, of necessity, befit both men and women." - Psyche
Two new books reveal the widening gulf between those who see the Constitution’s age as a sign of its wisdom and those who see it as the dead hand of the past. At stake is also a longer conflict about whether U.S. history is a matter of great changes or a changing sameness. - Boston Review
When you think it’s a Tuesday and it turns out to be Wednesday, you feel disoriented in a way that you don’t typically if you think it’s the 26th and it turns out to be the 27th. That’s the change: the real grip on our time consciousness that the week exerts. - The Atlantic
Mis- and disinformation are not the root causes of society’s ills but, rather, expose society’s failures to overcome systemic problems, such as income inequality, racism, and corruption, which can be exploited to promote false information online. - NiemanLab
The opacity of machine learning systems raises serious concerns about their trustworthiness and their tendency towards bias. But the brute fact that they work could be bringing us to a new understanding and experience of what the world is and our role in it. - Aeon
Whether or not a certain line of work is shameful or honorable is culturally relative, varying greatly. Farmers, soldiers, actors, dentists, prostitutes, pirates and priests have all been respected or despised in some society or other. - 3 Quarks Daily
