The Value of Culture
What exactly is culture? Melvyn Bragg is here to help us answer that question through his five-part Radio 4 series, The Value of Culture. Episodes: Culture and Anarchy, explores Matthew Arnold’s …
Culture
Extraordinary is the New Ordinary
Kevin Kelly, in The Improbable is the New Normal, an article on how the internet increasingly exposes us to massive quantities of impossible and improbable events, explores how that may affect our …
Kathryn Schulz on why Knowledge Collapses as often as it Accretes
Kathryn Schulz comments on the fantasy that knowledge is static in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking. Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras …
“We get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.”
If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invents a new perpetual-motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised …
Oliver Burkeman: The Power of Negative Thinking
“Think Positive.” That’s what magazines and friends advise us to do in order to cope with the stress of the holiday season. That’s the same advice that Norman Vincent Peale, …
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
Daniel Solove, author of Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security, argues that privacy matters even if you have nothing to hide. The nothing-to-hide argument pervades …
“The ability to inflict evil, or harm, on other people in huge numbers has grown exponentially.”
Unfortunately this is not a problem that we can wish away. In a opinion worth reading, philosopher Firmin DeBrabander writes: (in her book The Human Condition, philosopher Hannah Arendt) offers two …
The Half-life of Facts
Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades we were convinced that …
Five Rules to help you Learn to Love Volatility
Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder is having a profound impact on how I see the world. In this adapted piece from Antifragile, which appeared in the Wall Street …
Richard Feynman — Take the World From Another Point of View
In this clip from a documentary film shot in Yorkshire in 1973, physicist and philosopher Richard Feynman (1918-1988) talks with Fred Hoyle, an accomplished astronomer from the United Kingdom. Feynman …
Trust Me, I’m Lying: Why Sites Like Gawker Manipulate You
“A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on. …” — The Long Goodbye, …
Kurt Vonnegut: How To Write With Style
Kurt Vonnegut on writing with style. Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you …
Scientism
William Deresiewicz with an insightful article in The American Scholar arguing that we’ve fallen into the trap of scientism: the belief that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Reading …
The evolutionary function of religion
Excerpts from Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal on the evolutionary function of religion. In his trailblazing book Darwin’s Cathedral, the biologist David Sloan Wilson proposes that …
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
Carlo Cipolla, a former Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, lists the basic laws of human stupidity: The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that: Always and inevitably …
“stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face”
From Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: In his groundbreaking book How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face, along …