IDEAS

We got stuck with this particular version of nonbinary identity—singularly focused on pronouns, clumsy corporate integration, and iconoclastic affect—because nonbinary identity has become a brand. It is both a way of being in the world and an empty signifier. - The Baffler

We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. But viewing cooperation solely as a force for good betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. - The Guardian

Unless you think—and some philosophers do think this—that the large-scale future consequences of our practices don’t matter at all, it’s hard to see how the technical tools used to predict and quantify those consequences could be a poor fit for a book of applied ethics. - City Journal

The experience made me wonder: Why do we assume that cancel culture is a pervasive reality, and what’s the impact of that assumption? - The Atlantic

"The point isn’t that there’s something wrong with working from an office. It’s that there’s something right about working from home." Now, what does this mean for the arts? - The New York Times

Because so many people are used to using tabletop role-playing games, some therapists have decided to adapt the tools of the games. - Wired

Though the true past is fixed and unrevisable, stories about that past are not. Palaeontologists understand these stories as theories, but their audiences often experience them in the same ways they would experience fictional tales – as narratives that shift with mood and politics and time.  - Aeon

The overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be. - The Conversation

Pleasure activists believe that, by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us, we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists. - Boston Review

There are two kinds of things in the world: the good and the indifferents. Note that the first is singular, the second, plural. For there is only one good. ‘What is it?’ you may well ask. - 3 Quarks Daily

The better approach is to cultivate an appreciation for our ignorance, get comfortable with it and look at it very closely, disentangling it as much as possible from our ego to see what’s really there (or not there). - 3 Quarks Daily

Just ask the writers of the 18th century like Coleridge and Shelley (perhaps not Mary Shelley, whose experience was, well, different). - The Guardian (UK)

Fangirls aren't frivolous - or, even if they are, it's in the service of creativity. "A handful of books, documentaries, films and memoirs are celebrating the fizzy, dizzying heights of female obsession and what it offers teen girls and women." - The Guardian (UK)

And that's good: "The human body is both beautiful and fragile, and inflicting so much carnage on it is deeply unsettling." - Wired

Initially, Proust likens telephone exchange operators to supernatural beings, capriciously presiding over the ‘miracle’ of telephony, but then he develops a more sombre analogy between speaking to a loved one on the telephone and communicating with the dead. - Psyche