Category: ideas

Are today’s teenagers totally at the mercy of the corporate messages that everywhere lie in wait for them? “By sheer virtue of their population numbers, buying power and savvy, teens are not merely in vogue. Entire carpeted auditoriums of middle-age movie, TV, retail and Internet executives devote themselves to tracking the spending habits of these juniors, decoding their preferences, catering to their every mass hiccup.” A new book suggests that today’s teens are a “sad, hollow, cheated generation, thoroughly saturated by artful product placement, co-opted by viral marketing, oppressed by the trickle-down effect of the (now rather pockmarked) “contemporary luxury economy.”

A new academic history of boredom brings up some interesting notions about the way we spend our lives. The idea of being bored is actually a somewhat recent one, but the minute it got a name, absolutely everyone had to have a piece of it. As the world becomes more saturated with entertainment options, boredom has actually increased, as have attempts to cure it with, well, more entertainment options. “One of the more unexpected findings is that the best cure for boredom might be… more boredom. Or wearing a polar bear costume. In the war against monotony, people have tried all sorts of unusual remedies.”

“How does an economy best promote innovation? Do patents and copyrights nurture or stifle it? Have we gone too far in protecting intellectual property? In a paper that has gained wide attention (and caught serious flak) for challenging the conventional wisdom, economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine answer the final question with a resounding yes. Copyrights, patents, and similar government-granted rights serve only to reinforce monopoly control, with its attendant damages of inefficiently high prices, low quantities, and stifled future innovation, they write.”

Scientists think like scientists. And artists – well, they think like artists. For scientists looking to think about their work from a different perspective, artists might be a great resource. So take some artists and let them play with the machines of science and see what they come up with. That’s the premise behind a year-long project in Los Angeles. “Artists see things with different eyes and allow us to take a step back and reflect on what we do. Scientific research is supposed to be about everything, but even at universities we are pushed to be quite narrow. We lose sight of the big picture, so this is a good thing for us.”

“Emotion has always been at the core of the humanities: Without the passions, there would not be much history, and even less literature. Indeed the very word “philosophy” begins with philos (love). But only in recent years have scholars begun focusing, without embarrassment, on emotion itself, producing a body of work that regularly crosses the line between the humanities and the social sciences, with occasional forays into neurophysiology.”

Some researchers say population increase triggered creativity. But an anthropologist says human creativity is the result of a mutant gene. “There was a biological change, a genetic mutation of some kind that promoted the fully modern ability to create and innovate. When you look at the archaeological record before 50,000 years ago, it is remarkably homogeneous. There are no geographically delineated groups of artefacts. Suddenly, modern-looking people began to behave in a modern way, producing art and jewellery… manufacturing styles and different cultures.”

“For a decade, scientists and engineers have used virtual reality and other so-called ‘immersive technologies’ to help them visualize complex designs and natural phenomena. A project underway at Brown University is taking that concept a step further by exploring how these 3-D computerized environments could expand our understanding of the written word.” The man in charge of the project is Robert Coover, who began his examination of what he calls ‘The Cave’ of virtual environments years ago, with actions as simple and revolutionary as imbedding hyperlinks in his text. Now, the experiment has expanded to include audio, virtual reality, and other innovations so far afield from traditional ‘writing’ as to seem more like a video game than a novel.

A real, old-fashioned literary spat is developing on the pages of two of America’s most respected magazines, and the focus of the debate is George Orwell, the cynical cuss who penned Animal Farm and 1984 and coined the term “Cold War.” In the blue corner, arguing for Orwell’s continuing relevance in the age of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, is professional agitator Chris Hitchens, backed up by The New Republic’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. And in the red corner, arguing that Orwell wasn’t nearly as prescient and sagelike as he is often given credit for, is Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Louis Menand. Let’s get ready to grumblllllllle!

Are personality, intelligence, gender, and the moral sense in the genes or are they the stuff of culture? A new book argues that “new sciences of human nature — combining cognitive science, neuroscience, genetics, and evolution—strongly suggest that our minds are partly ‘hardwired’ at birth. This hardwiring likely underlies many human universals—forms of behavior and mental structures shared by all peoples in all cultures, e.g., baby talk and incest avoidance. But it also seems likely that such hardwiring underlies some differences among people.”