Leon Wieseltier: “Everything will be different: this is a ubiquitous sentiment. In all our upheavals — social and epidemiological — so much seems to be wrong and so much seems to be slipping away that one may be forgiven for enjoying a fantasy of total change. All these horrors, all these outrages, all these marches, and the world stays the same? So the first thing that needs to be said in the effort to keep our heads is that everything never changes.” – Liberties Journal
Tag: 12.20
Understanding The Concept Of Electricity Was Difficult At First
“The strangeness of electricity seemed to be that it was at once ‘so moveable and incapable of rest’ and yet also capable of being arrested if deprived of a suitable conductor, for example, by the air.” – Cabinet
The Argument Over Who Controls The New Digital Public Squares
The speech platforms are rather closer to a form of mass voluntary intellectual pornography: a marketplace that lauds the basest instincts, incentivizes snark and outrage, brings us to revel in the savage burn. – National Affairs
The Difficulty Of Determining Rights
Some desirable ideals – like a human right to subsistence – simply can’t be realised as a universal human right, Biggar argues, since it is impossible to determine who must deliver on the obligation to feed the entire world’s poor. – Literary Review
AI-Created Art – A Dystopic Future?
“The glorious trajectory of Western European art, after sputtering to a pause with Pollock and Koons, would succumb entirely as does the world in “The Hollow Men,” “not with a bang, but with a whimper”—only the soft whirring of the computer hard drive will be audible.” – New Criterion
Pulling Apart A Critique Of Meritocracy
Some of the meritorious leaders out there were trade unionists, some Harvard professors. So what? And what’s the alternative? Rule by the meretricious, the stupid and the malevolent? – Literary Review
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