“Although my calling something a gimmick registers a subjective response, it also demands agreement or invites confrontation, and more brazenly so than other judgments. Should a fan of robot chefs and Roombas question why I harbor such unwarranted suspicions about them, I will feel compelled to convince him that my suspicions ought to be felt universally. But I will also delight in a newfound sense of superiority, my belief that only I am discerning enough to see that these devices are overvalued, too good to be true.” – The New Yorker
Category: ideas
What COVID Has Exposed: We Need To Rethink Schools
Pandemic school is clearly not working well, especially for younger children—and it’s all but impossible for the 20 percent of American students who lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. But what parents are coming to understand about their kids’ education—glimpsed through Zoom windows and “asynchronous” classwork—is that school was not always working so great before COVID-19 either. – The Atlantic
What Our Robots Tell Us About Ourselves
Building robot versions of oneself is a thing people do a lot now, and in part because there are robots everywhere online. The majority of web traffic is driven by bots, which can send and reply to emails, answer security questions, post comments, tweet, chat, and more. Last year, Twitter estimated that up to 23 million active accounts may be automated bots. – The Atlantic
The End Of Post-War Liberal Globalism?
“This narrative of a US-led global journey to the promised land was always implausible. Four years of Trump have finally clarified that between 2001 and 2020—and through such events as the terrorist attacks of September 11, intensified globalization, the rise of China concurrent with the failed war on terror, and the financial crisis—the world was moving into an entirely new historical period. Moreover, in this phase, many ideas and assumptions dominant for decades were rapidly becoming obsolete.” – New York Review of Books
How (And When) Humans Learned To Invent
“Something happened in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to cause an explosion of ingenuity orders of magnitude greater than anything seen in other species, including our big-brained cousins the Neanderthals. But what? And when?” – Literary Review
How To Market To Millennials And Zoomers?
Maybe ask this guy, who tweeted that he was going to write an erotic story about the president. “He released Trump Temptations: The Billionaire and the Bell Boy, a fictional account of Mr. Trump and a male lover, on Amazon. It blew up before it was taken down, at which point Mr. Daniel released it for free on Wattpad, a self-publishing site focused on fan fiction, where it was viewed 2.3 million times.” – The New York Times
How Archaeology Regards Layers And Order
Past use doesn’t determine what we mean by uttering a word on a particular occasion, but it does shape what a speaker can intend to get across. If I am being cooperative, and I intend to make a request that you pass something on the table, I won’t use a word I know you don’t know. To do so would be to violate a tacit commitment to a basic principle of cooperation, which Grice argues underpins all communication. – Psyche
The “Me Industrial Complex”
“On the internet, another name for confession is over-sharing, and it has become synonymous with how we use social media platforms. People can’t get a hold of me over text, but they can just read my tweets: it’s all there, every beat of my mental state.” – Sydney Review of Books
Why Should Art Need To Be “Relevant”?
“The common forebear of both “relevant” and “relieve” is the French relever, which meant, originally, to put back into an upright position, to raise again, a word that twisted through time, scattering meanings that our two modern words have apportioned between them: to ease pain or discomfort, to make stand out, to render prominent or distinct, to rise up or rebel, to rebuild, to reinvigorate, to make higher, to set free.” – Harper’s
Why Anxiety Is Essential To Our Wellbeing
“The most fundamental enquiry of all is into our selves; anxiety is the key to this sacred inner chamber, revealing which existential problematic – the ultimate concerns of death, meaning, isolation, freedom – we are most eager to resolve.” – Psyche