Some physicists bat it around, with the help of art: "We meet up, sometimes over a drink, to exchange ideas and share our latest musings in cosmology or molecular biology. We have often stayed up late talking while listening to our favourite jazz or flamenco musicians." - New Scientist
"Guest speakers, frequently invited, included Margaret Sanger, the poet Amy Lowell, Emma Goldman speaking on 'Anarchy,' and Edith Ellis, a lesbian writer in an open marriage with the scandalous sexologist Havelock Ellis, speaking on the topic of 'Love.'" There were even "husbands' evenings," when men were allowed. - LitHub
Preprints are an issue. "It’s all too easy to make outsize claims that sidestep the process of peer review. No publication should carry a standalone abstract. ... even scientific papers that have passed through the intended safeguards of peer review can become vectors for confusion." - Nieman Lab
It sure feels like that sometimes. But "if nothing ever changes, then we are all locked inside the iron cage of the present tense. ... There’s no agency. No choice." - LitHub
"The smile has always been with us then, and it would appear it's always been the same. It seems only one step further to claim that the smile has no history. But this would be far from the truth. In fact, the smile has a fascinating, if much-neglected past." - Aeon
"As its perspective has spread out into popular culture, pop EvoPsych has inflected highly charged debates about gender, race, violence, and social class. It has also permeated a receptive Silicon Valley culture that shares much of its intellectual DNA." - The Yale Review
Recommendation systems pose difficult questions about what it means to speak, and whether speaking is something that only a person does. How do we draw a line between expressions and actions? And who (or what) can be considered a ‘speaker’? - Psyche
It might seem the other way around: that our fleeting attention is the result of an internet that’s unrelentingly feeding us the now. But my hunch is that people feel stuck or move on because online, these events feel like things that have happened, rather than something that is happening. - The Atlantic
Technically speaking, as soon as a user in a war zone picks up a smartphone to assist the army, both the technology and the individual could be considered sensors, or nodes, ... blurring the lines between civilian and combatant activity. - Wired
It is now more than half a century since the heyday of political modernism and the sociological project that accompanied it. Are we still, today, postmodern? Are we really still grappling with the fallout of 1968? - London Review of Books
“Clickbait” has long been the term for misleading, shallow online articles that exist only to sell ads. But on today’s Internet the term could describe content across every field, from the unmarked ads on an influencer’s Instagram page to pseudonymous pop music designed to game the Spotify algorithm. - The New Yorker
Our model of social change is still rooted in midcentury clichés. Younger Americans imagine that starting a family and owning a home was much easier for previous generations than it really was. They buy the broad outlines of the boomers’ nostalgia and take it to mean they are inheriting a desiccated society. - The New York Times
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives." - Slate
There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better. - The New Yorker
