"The film set pub lay for a year-and-a-half in a yard on Achill Island - and when Luke offered to buy it from his brother-in-law, he was told he could have it for nothing. ... He already had a pub licence - ideal." - BBC
The second word in the three Rs of environmentalism is reuse for a reason, writes Rowan Moore of planned London construction. "The most sustainable building is the one that is already there, as the now-fashionable saying goes." - The Observer (UK)
The words nationalism and patriotism are sometimes used as synonyms, such as when Trump and his supporters describe his America First agenda. But many political scientists, including me, don’t typically see those two terms as equivalent – or even compatible. - The Conversation
France has long been associated with a specific version of the good life, from haute cuisine to haute couture. In the global imagination, the French excel not only at putting quality before quantity, but also in distributing the finer things more widely than their Anglophone counterparts. - Aeon
The identification of the present, not as a hectic shimmer of zeptoseconds but a series of temporal clearings where one might deeply linger, originates in the Buddhist concept of “sati”, understood as “moment to moment awareness of present events”. - The Guardian
About two million people call Mecca home, and while there are concessions to the city's sacredness — no movie theaters, no loud music at celebrations, and the malls are small by Gulf standards — Meccans live much like other Saudis. - AP
When did the so-called narrative turn—the doctrine of narrative supremacy—go mainstream? “At a certain point in history, people started saying, ‘We are born storytellers,’ ” the novelist Amit Chaudhuri said at a 2018 symposium he convened called “Against Storytelling.” - The New Yorker
The ideal of nature as it used to be before human intervention and before we introduced what we now call “invasive species” is one that Western urbanites created in the late nineteenth century, chiefly as a foil for their own modernity. - The New Atlantis
Remember when it was a sign of, like, total rebellion to blow a huge bubble on screen? Well, that time is long gone - and the pandemic has helped kill off what was left. - The Atlantic
Sure, you can blame ChatGPT etc., but: "The pressure to sell one’s race and race-based adversity to colleges will compel students to write like chatbots. Tired platitudes about race angled to persuade admissions officers will crowd out more individual, creative approaches." - The Atlantic
Fortunately, there is a formula to solve this problem without unrealistically suggesting that we dispense entirely with our competitive urge: Instead of always going for gold, shoot for the bronze. - The Atlantic
The study showed that "while people with higher intelligence scores solved the easy problems quicker, they took longer to solve the difficult ones, apparently because they spent more time inferring hidden rules before reaching the correct solution." - Big Think
Readers interested in isms—feudalism, imperialism, capitalism, etc.—won’t find these subjects explicitly discussed. Rather, the author addresses the faceless structures of human existence by writing about who advocated for and implemented them, and who benefited from or suffered under them. - Wall Street Journal
The science of bioacoustics opens up a novel window into worlds of sound unheard by human ears. Across our planet, sound is a primordial form of conveying complex ecological information; a vast range of species — even those without ears — are remarkably sensitive to sound. - Noema
People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. - The New York Times
