Category: ideas

Remote work changes how, and where, people live. But are towns near national parks or in resort areas remotely, so to speak, ready for an influx of workers from cities? Not even close. “Housing affordability and cost of living issues are a concern in gateway communities across the West.” – FastCompany

The UK has its first Black woman history professor Her take: “I was very surprised by the whole movement. It was coming from young people taking matters into their own hands. But I also understand that this conversation has been going for decades and it looked as if we’d exhausted all other avenues.” – The Guardian (UK)

https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/justin-h-vassallo-world-henry-ford-madeHenry Ford would likely find his relevance to the current crisis of globalization a testament to his “producerist” philosophy. But as historian Stefan J. Link writes in his new book, Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order, Ford’s peculiar ideals “projected a political (and moral) economy that hardly anticipated the American consumer modernity that emerged after 1945.” – Boston Review

It has always been hard to make a living in the arts; what is new, William Deresiewicz contends, is that even moderately successful artists — who publish, show, or perform frequently — often struggle to lead a middle-class life. – Los Angeles Review of Books

Really? Science? Just how do you even define what wisdom is (as opposed to knowledge). Yet some have attempted to quantify it. – Psyche

At the nation’s most significant moment of racial reckoning since the 1960s, it’s become one of the hottest culture-war battlefields, where the combatants include turf-guarding academics, political ideologues angling for an election-year advantage — and the fearlessly spiky journalism superstar who willed the entire thing into existence. All of this can make it easy to forget what the 1619 Project was — basically, a collection of smart, provocative magazine articles about the ways slavery shaped our nation. – Washington Post

The witty philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser once asked B F Skinner: ‘You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphise people?’– and we’re saying that biologists should chill out and see the virtues of anthropomorphising all sorts of living things. After all, isn’t biology really a kind of reverse engineering of all the parts and processes of living things? Ever since the cybernetics advances of the 1940s and ’50s, engineers have had a robust, practical science of mechanisms with purpose and goal-directedness – without mysticism. We suggest that biologists catch up. – Aeon

The effective altruism movement, which aims to help others as much as possible as effectively as possible, has a certain undeniable logic. So why hasn’t it caught on? A key reason is that it clashes with basic human morality. – Psyche

Remote learning renders presence theoretical, distraction all but inevitable, and eagerness an uphill climb. On Zoom, absolute receptivity is very difficult to achieve. Remote learning asks us, as Mary Cappello does, to reimagine the humanities lecture as a teaching tool that works even, or especially, for the distractible listener. To Cappello, in fact, distraction is the heart of the form. She argues that lectures are a tool for sparking thought, not for imparting information. – The Atlantic