Category: ideas

What will happen next? We don’t fully know. (Of course, we never know, but the pandemic makes it worse.) Novelist Nancy Star: “Aren’t we all lost now, in the pandemic, trying to see what’s going to happen next, unable to catch more than a glimpse of a few feet ahead? Plans have been of questionable use. I still don’t know what made me buy so many frozen vegetables. … I know this feeling. This is how it feels to write a first draft of a novel.” – LitHub

Chess sets are sold out all over the United States, and little kids (and adults) of all genders are suddenly very, very into chess. What if Queen’s Gambit had been the rage 50 years ago, instead of, or alongside of, stories about Bobby Fischer? – Los Angeles Times

“Before I drag you any further down what might strike you as a rocky, obscure and unpromising path, let me furnish an illustration of scientific censorship in action: the case of beauty.” – Aeon

“While aesthetic experiences are universal, most people would probably agree that some of us are more aesthetically sensitive than others. But what does that really mean? In casual conversation, we’ll make claims such as This car is beautiful, and we’re prone to thinking that there is something inherent to the car that makes it aesthetically pleasing. From there, a logical deduction is that aesthetic sensitivity describes the ability to detect and appreciate beauty wherever it exists. However, I believe that the ‘beauty’ is not in the car itself, but in the perceptual processes that end with a pleasant or unpleasant visual aesthetic experience.” – Psyche

“More and more we view opposing partisans as alien to ourselves, dislike and distrust them, and see them as iniquitous. “Viewing opposing partisans as different, or even as dislikable or immoral, may not be problematic in isolation,” the researchers write. “But when all three converge, political losses can feel like existential threats that must be averted—whatever the cost.” Which of course includes alleging that elections are rigged.” – Nautilus

Modern psychology’s approach to creativity was born in 1950, but it was the Sputnik shock of 1957 that turned attention to the role that creativity plays in the real world. Over the following decades, psychologists would come to understand that creativity is not merely a matter of how we think, but also a function of our personalities (some people are inclined to be more open-minded than others) and where we work or learn (some environments are more conducive to creativity than others, for example through encouraging free thinking). – Psyche

The curated images of other people’s lives we see on the screen can leave us feeling like we’re comparatively inadequate. The often spoken of “fear-of-missing-out” is a real thing. When you have dozens of people doing something once, with continual updating it can appear like everybody is doing something all the time. The political aspects of social media can make things worse. Even when people agree with you, the slew of information can be too much, says Dr. Erin Elfant, a clinical psychologist working out of California. – Big Think

“We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains.” – Paris Review

The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. – The New Yorker

“Some people were willing to forego their meagre ration of food and forget their fatigue to attend the artistic performances in the concentration camp. For me this is a potent reminder to challenge crude approaches to ranking basic human needs and the components of a decent human life.” – Aeon