Category: ideas

As one of the few people in the world who speaks and understands Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew, Jack Miles belongs to “the over-educated sliver of the audience for “The Passion” that can hear both “original” languages with a measure of comprehension.” Of course there are historical inaccuracies. But “time will tell whether this film will have any longer a life or any deeper an impact than its predecessors in the genre, all of which seem faded or eccentric failures in retrospect. The plot of the Gospel—good, beautiful man confronts evil, ugly establishment, loses everything, but then miraculously wins everything back in the end—is Christianity’s supreme gift to Hollywood.”

“A new report, based on interviews with young people across Britain, suggests that more and more white youths now see black street culture as their only credible influence in the UK. And, what’s more, the predominance of black culture has even led to the formation of a fledgling hybrid language – ‘Blinglish’.”

“A few decades of research has made it clear that most people are terrible choosers—they don’t know what they want, and the prospect of deciding often causes not just jitters but something like anguish. The evidence is all around us, from restaurant-goers’ complaints that “the menu is too long” to Michael Jackson’s face. The phenomenon isn’t new…”

“The way we perceive what we call ‘real’ speech in drama is constantly changing: the mirror held up to nature is a lens whose focal length changes with time. In the theatre the search for documentary truth is the logical extension of an art form that seeks to present slices of life while always reminding the spectator (unlike film) that what they are watching is a simulation of life, a metaphor for it, not the real thing. The desire to make that experience of simulated reality more “real”, more like life as it is rather than how it’s supposed to be, is the motor of modern theatre.”

“As traditionally understood, the soul is something that is both within us and yet superior to us, a repository for the most precious (or in some accounts “divine”) aspects of us. The soul survives when the rest of us dies, it can continue indefinitely (like a kind of hardy seed preserved in arctic tundra), and may even reinhabit a bodily form at another time. The idea that we have a soul should, if we can manage to believe it, stop us feeling quite so sad that we must die. What makes a history of the soul rewarding is that it offers a useful way into the question of what different societies and thinkers have at various points viewed as the most important aspect of life.”

How are languages created, and how do they evolve? A group of deaf kids in Nicaragua have developed their own sign language and are teaching linguists much about the evolution of language.

“Over the past couple of decades, the ethics industry has kicked into high gear. We now have a growing number of professional ethicists who are prepared to act as superegos for hire to the various professions. Indeed, take any given profession and there is another profession called the ethics of that profession. (Think bioethics, medical ethics, legal ethics, computer ethics, and so forth.)”

Critics act like teenagers are completely at the mercy of the mass culture, that they’re empty vessels that can be filled up and manipulated by whatever base, nasty thing that comes along. But teens have a lot more going for them than they’re given credit for, and this is actually not the case…