Category: ideas

“An attachment to a bill that supplements funds for Iraq, passed by Congress and now on the president’s desk, would allow the United States once again to keep out and to deport foreign nationals not for their conduct, but for their politics—their ideas, their speech, and the groups with which they associate.”

Are we getting smarter? A popular new book tries to make the case, but Malcom Gladwell wonders what kind of “smart” we’re talking about. “Being “smart” involves facility in both kinds of thinking—the kind of fluid problem solving that matters in things like video games and I.Q. tests, but also the kind of crystallized knowledge that comes from explicit learning. The real question is what the right balance of these two forms of intelligence might look like.”

So we’re learning more and more about how the brain works. And new technology might soon allow us to peer into the workings of the head. But there might be some downsides. “The more that breakthroughs like the recent one in brain-scanning open up the mind to scientific scrutiny, the more we may be pressed to give up comforting metaphysical ideas like interiority, subjectivity and the soul. Let’s enjoy them while we can.”

“In the USA, free downloads of copyrighted music are driving the recording industry to sue teenagers and holler about the morality of obtaining songs for free. But if China is the future, that’s all in vain. The genie is out of the bottle. Eventually, recorded music will no longer make money. That would be nice for consumers and really bad for record companies and retailers. But the biggest concern is that this will be terrible for artists. If artists can’t earn money, economic logic says they might stop making music, which would be a major loss for society. But is that equation true?”

As consumers become ever more impervious to traditional advertising, marketers are becoming ever more obsessive in their attempts to track consumer habits and target specific ad messages to individuals who will be most receptive to them. At the annual Ad-Tech conference in San Francisco, cutting-edge techniques to ensnare potential buyers comingle with such low-tech ideas as cutting back on the number of ads shown on television. Most intriguing, something called Project Apollo promises to provide greater consumer trackability than ever before, providing what advertisers hope will be a surefire method of discovering which ad campaigns actually work.

When art takes its inspiration from actual events, where should the line between fact and fiction be allowed to melt away? Do artists have a responsibility to the truth, or do the demands of narrative flow trump historical reality? Dominic Papatola isn’t conflicted: “Historians and journalists have their biases, but they’re at least working with the filters of balance, objectivity and completeness. Artists — at least when they’re making art — don’t have those filters, nor should they be expected to. We’re complacent — no, we’re brainless — if we assume otherwise.”

“In the past few years, television stations have begun to reformat their screen presentations to include scrolling screens, sports scores, stock prices and current weather news. These visual elements are all designed to give viewers what they want when they want it. However, Kansas State University researchers say that it’s not working. ‘Our conclusion has been that if you want people to understand the news better, then get that stuff off the screen. Clean it up and get it off because it is simply making it more difficult for people to understand what the anchor is saying. We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don’t have it on the screen.”