Category: ideas

Loving monsters is a love of chaos, a longing to dance a little with death to better understand the danger. Cryptid violence is more approachable than human violence. It’s easy to ponder ways to control something that is other, a thing. We’ve built entire political and economic structures based upon just that—imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism. It’s more difficult to figure out how to survive the things we do to ourselves. – LitHub

“The global pandemic made it difficult to sit exams safely, so a solution needed to be devised. By looking at a combination of teacher’s predictions, past individual performance, and past school performance, grades were generated for every high school student in the UK. But as soon as the grades started to come in, thousands of students and teachers were shocked to see bright students getting poor grades. How it could it be that otherwise diligent and intelligent students from poor backgrounds were getting results which were demolishing ambitions?” – 3 Quarks Daily

“Multiply your age by 0.9. If you’re forty, you’ve spent thirty-six of your years indoors. About a third of that is time spent sleeping, but still. Most humans who live in the United States and Europe spend more time indoors than some species of whale spend underwater. It may be that the minutes you spent walking to and from the subway on a Tuesday in January tallied up to fewer minutes than a whale spent on the surface, filling its lungs, that same day.” – The New Yorker

Voice recognition, like that used by Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, is a step toward more seamless integration of human and machine. The next step, one that scientists around the world are pursuing, is technology that allows people to control computers — and everything connected to them, including cars, robotic arms and drones — merely by thinking. – The New York Times

In sum, lockdown has been positive for knowledge worker productivity in the short term. But it has also created some concerns and challenges around longer-term effectiveness, creativity, and personal resilience. – Harvard Business Review

It’s 2020, so video games, of course. “History games can spark interest in learning more, says Bob Whitaker, a professor of History at Collin College and host of the podcast History Respawned, where historians talk about history-themed video games.” – Time Magazine

What do documentary filmmakers owe their subjects? What if the documentary wins multiple awards, grosses a lot of money, and makes the subjects (and documentarians) famous?  Staying involved is “a ‘kind of a payback,’ Mr. Georgiev said. ‘Usually you don’t interfere with your protagonists — but as soon as we realized Honeyland would be very successful, we thought we had to do something.'” – The New York Times

What we think we know about the fight for women to get the legal right to vote is only a sliver of the history – and of our present. “There’s a lot of that still hanging in the balance. And so, I guess my answer is that I hate to think of it solely as a fight, but I think that the question of women’s equality is far from complete.” – NPR

The city is indeed at a moment of reckoning—not simply because of the pandemic, but because of what it had already become. After the fiscal crisis of 1975, New York and its economy were restructured around tourism, high finance, luxury retail, and real estate. On the glittering surface, things had never looked better. By 2019, New York was richer than it had ever been before, its population at an all-time high and its forests of glass towers rising ever higher. Nearly 65 million tourists a year were flocking to the city—more than six times the number who came when the city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Beneath that glittering surface was a lot of emptiness. – The Atlantic

For three years, 120 people are to receive 1,200 euros per month, and throughout the study period, they will be closely observed and frequently interviewed, as will the 1,380 members of the control group, who will receive no money. – Der Spiegel