Category: ideas

Recent research suggests the brain circuitry for anxiety and fear, separate emotions long thought to activate different regions in the brain, overlap. – Axios

 “We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life.” – New Statesman

Music is a Socratic teacher. Its melodies and call-and-response mechanisms, together with the subsequent variations in modulations and rhythms, steer us away from linear thinking and towards nuance. – Psyche

“We have moved from an age of institutionalized specialization in the second half of the nineteenth century to an age of institutionalized anti-specialization in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.” – Washington Post

The reason that Aristotle bothered to outline these three kinds of knowledge is that they require different styles of thinking—the people toiling in each of these realms tend toward habits of mind that serve them well, and distinguish them from the others. Aristotle’s point was that, if you have a phronetic problem to solve, don’t send an epistemic thinker. – Harvard Business Review

“Consumerism boomed in the early years of the Third Reich (and even, for a time, during the war). For all that Nazism was a dictatorship, ordinary non-Jewish Germans felt they had choices they had not had before. As the economy improved, Germans travelled widely, a process supported by Nazi organisations such as Strength Through Joy, which offered a range of affordable holidays. Travel-writing journalism developed as a form. The Nazis made theatre and concerts available to wider audiences.” – History Today

Looking back at the last four decades, it’s clear that the divide between winners and losers has been deepened, poisoning our politics and driving us apart. This has partly to do with deepening inequality of income and wealth. But it’s about more than that. It has to do with the fact that those who landed on top came to believe that their success was their own doing, the measure of their merit — and by implication that those left behind had no one to blame but themselves. – Chronicle of Higher Education

Universities everywhere have hosted eccentric cults and the gods of reason have somehow survived them. What was new in Critical Theory – at least in its latter-day incarnation – was its adoption of militant direct action to enforce its creed. – Times Literary Supplement

There is an odd tension in the concept of disruption: it suggests a thorough disrespect towards whatever existed previously, but in truth it often seeks to simply rearrange whatever exists. Disruption is possessed of a deep fealty to whatever is already given. It seeks to make it more efficient, more exciting, more something, but it never ever wants to dispense altogether with what’s out there. This is why its gestures are always radical, but its effects never really upset the apple cart. – The Guardian

In the latter half of the 19th century, when small-scale artisanal methods were giving way to larger-scale industrialization in many areas of resource extraction and use, Homo sapiens was not, in fact, just another species, an organism like any other. To the contrary, H. sapiens was just embarking on a period of more sudden environmental transformation than any single species had ever achieved. Homo sapiens was, in fact, quite special. – Nautilus