Here's the deal: "Founded in 1898, the institution had capped membership at 250 since 1908; members are elected for life and pay no dues." Before this year, the only way to add a member was for another member to die - and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Academy was made up of mostly white men. Poet Joy Harjo, one of the...
"A striking feature of our current political landscape is that we disagree not just over values (which is healthy in a democracy), and not just over facts (which is inevitable), but over our very standards for determining what the facts are. Call this knowledge polarization, or polarization over who knows—which experts to trust, and what is rational and what...
These kinds of metaphors reduce us to achievement-driven and advantage-seeking entities, condemned constantly to self-optimise, as if our highest purpose is to be effective instruments. But effectiveness for effectiveness’s sake is an empty aim. Such imagery also casts us as competitors vying for scarce resources in a playing field in which the fittest survive – in this case the...
"What if situating the human at the heart of design isn’t enough to steer innovation in the right direction? What if it’s precisely what we should avoid? Human-centred thinking has marked drawbacks. We can trace the desire to focus on the human – and the human alone – to an anthropocentric logic that has guided technological development for centuries...
"As a neuroscientist, I see scientific myths about the brain repeated regularly in the media and corners of academic research. Three of them, in particular, stand out for correction. After all, each of us has a brain, so it’s critical to understand how that three-pound blob between your ears works." - Nautilus
Enter the Uffizi Diffusi project. Meaning "scattered Uffizi," it's a reimagining of Italy's "scattered hotel" concept, in which individual "rooms" are located in different houses of a village. In this project, artworks stored in the Uffizi's deposit will be put on show throughout the surrounding area of Tuscany, turning Italy's most famous region into one big "scattered" museum. -...
"Until quite recently there was a concern that ethical relativism had become the dominant cultural assumption, which meant that ethics was all just a matter of opinion, every view was ‘equally valid’ with no objective standard. We seem now to have been catapulted to the other extreme. Ethical positions are often held with a fervent certainty that would embarrass...
"Our information crisis can and should be treated like a virus. Responding to fake stories or conspiracy theories after the fact is woefully insufficient, just as post-infection treatments don’t compare to vaccines. Indeed, a growing body of social science suggests that fact-checks and debunkings do little to correct falsehoods after people have seen a piece of misinformation (the unintentional...
For now, pronoun declarations are both novel and blatant — which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether you’re socially progressive or socially conservative. As in almost every other segment of American life, society is fractured. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Cynicism, at scale, makes democracy’s most basic demand—seeing one another as we are—impossible. And America, at the moment, is saturated with it. - The Atlantic
A study, published in 2019, looked at long-term trends in the health of a group of nearly five thousand Swedish workers. They found that repeated exposure to “high information and communication technology demands” (translation: a need to be constantly connected) were associated with “suboptimal” health outcomes. - The New Yorker
It's not easy for any of us. "More information isn’t always a good thing, particularly when it’s an overload of unwanted (even predatory) (mis)information." And the designers of search engines use keywords that, to put it mildly, don't always work for humans who aren't the search engine designers. But new apps may give some hope. - Slate
The COVID-19 pandemic has wrung meaning from time. Each day is so like the former. April disappeared entirely; Thanksgiving feels as close, or faraway, as last June. I no longer can keep track of the dates; time has become a pool of standing water. - Psyche
"It’s almost as though the existence of animals, and their various similarities to humans, constituted insults. Like a squirrel, I have eyes and ears, scurry about on the ground and occasionally climb a tree. (One of us does this better than the other does.) Our shared qualities — the fact that we are both hairy or that we have...
"The trouble is that smiling is easy to do. If flashing a smile can so easily convey good intent, it could be ‘hacked’ by unscrupulous individuals who want you to think that they’re trustworthy so they can exploit you. These kinds of ‘false smiles’ certainly happen in everyday life, yet we still generally trust smiles. In my research, I...
