A pragmatist ethics calls for prioritising feelings instead of facts, because a truly humanist democracy is sentimentalist rather than rationalist. - Aeon
The anodyne blandness of the term “general education” should not distract us from its critical place in the curriculum. General education forces a question that most institutions today would probably rather avoid: What should all students learn? - The Point
Most elderly people would have flunked a human version of the team’s experiments. But all of the cuttlefish passed, “an incredibly complex thing for an animal to do.” - The Atlantic
Foundational models have some very real downsides. They create “a single point of failure, so any defects, any biases which these models have, any security vulnerabilities . . . are just blindly inherited by all the downstream tasks." - Fast Company
“It doesn’t take someone broken or disturbed to crave that structure . . . we’re wired to. And what we often overlook is that the material with which that scaffolding is built, the very material that fabricates our reality, is language.” - The Baffler
These people are generally well-educated workers who are leaving their jobs not because the pandemic created obstacles to their employment but, at least in part, because it nudged them to rethink the role of work in their lives altogether. - The New Yorker
For Fukuyama, the demise of the Soviet Union testified to the “total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives” to––and thus, the “unabashed victory”––of “economic and political liberalism.” - Hedgehog Review
It’s not that we don’t think—we are constantly reading, opining, debating—but that we seem to do it on the run, while squinting at trolls in our phones. - The New Yorker
The general public in the United States sees intellectuals as disconnected from their everyday struggles and concerns. From this perspective, intellectuals don’t actually work like the laborers amongst us, but are engaged in a kind of elitist moralizing. - 3 Quarks Daily
"Multiculturalism was the response to civil rights demands, which required a revised narrative of U.S. history. For this scheme to work—and affirm U.S. historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture or somehow woven into the story." - Boston Review
Death catches too many of us unawares and unprepared these days, because we prefer to look away, to deny the approach of the one most undeniable event. - The Point
Despite this surge in support for privacy, we’re looking at a situation where routine surveillance of citizens will continue to become normalized—not through coercion, but through convenience. - Fast Company
Since we are considering whether extinction might be better than continuing to exist, the question arises whether some pains could be so great that they outweigh any number of pleasures and other goods. - New Statesman
The account by the Greek historian and general, Thucydides (460-400BC), of how the Athenians responded to their virulent plague in the fifth century, directly or indirectly influenced how many later historians in antiquity described plagues. - The Conversation
