A third of all Americans clock 45 hours or more of work per week, with 8 million reporting 60-plus hours. Compared with 1940, individuals now consume almost 90 times more screen-fed information. That’s 82 hours per week – or 69 per cent of our waking hours. That’s a lot. - Psyche
Though the number of Americans who said that they personally were “doing at least okay” actually rose slightly from 2019 to 2021, their evaluation of the national economy plummeted in that time frame. - The Atlantic
Around 6,000 years ago, the first standardised units were deployed in river valley civilisations such as ancient Egypt, where the cubit was defined by the length of the human arm, from elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and used to measure out the dimensions of the pyramids. - The Guardian
Maybe we rubberneck over disasters because we are bored by our relatively cushy safety. Or maybe we can’t avoid the threats as they creep up on us, which only encourages more distraction. - The Daily Beast
The root is simple: The internet is broken because the internet is a business. While the issues are various and complex, they are inextricable from the fact that the internet is owned by private firms and is run for profit. - The New York Times
Picture Frances "as she whips out her phone and bursts, 'I just got a tax rebate! Want to go to dinner?' (I did not know a decade ago that this would become the most relatable five seconds in the whole of cinema. Alas.)" - LitHub
Jeff VanderMeer investigates Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, and our devastating realities. "Just as the inhabitants of Winter have dozens of words for snow and ice, we need as many words for ecocide. If fiction can be useful here, it is rendering the crime more visible." - Orion
Studying the imagination is the most exciting and accurate way to heal the terminal divide between the sciences and the humanities. But, more importantly, Imagination Studies, or imaginology, also promises to reunite the body and the mind, reintegrate emotion and reason. - Aeon
Excellent sheephood is inherently competitive. Its purpose is to vault you into the ranks of society’s winners, to make sure that you end up with more stuff—more wealth, status, power, access, comfort, freedom—than most other people. This is not a pretty project, when you look it in the face. - Bari Weiss
The scientific revolutions of the last four centuries took place not just at the same time as political and religious conflict, invasion and enslavement, but because of these things. - New Statesman
Philanthropists rarely make the large, unrestricted gifts that the receiving institutions really want, and so the two parties bargain: over the purpose and the control of a gift, over the form of credit, over how much the institution has to raise from other sources as a condition. - The New Yorker
We can at least say of the oil economy that its environmental damage, and consequent destruction of the human world, is only an epiphenomenon, whereas for the internet, the destruction of the human is itself the source of value. - LA Review of Books
I too grew up imbibing common technotopian fantasies of the late-20th Century zeitgeist, of a belief in humanity’s manifest destiny of multi-planetary spread and dominion. I just didn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together until I tried to understand climate change. - 3 Quarks Daily
