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realness in hip-hop has a slippery definition, related to the everyday sense of the word but not synonymous with it. 

Artists of all kinds feel obliged to establish authenticity. Bob Dylan was a refugee from middle-class Minnesota, but his gnomic responses to interview questions allowed him to brand himself as a rambling countercultural troubadour. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s reputation as a formerly homeless autodidact helped endear him to gallerists who prized edginess. But the problem of authenticity was particularly acute in early hip-hop, which had a dual mandate—fictional in some ways, journalistic in others. “Rap is CNN for black people,” Chuck D is often alleged to have said. What he actually said was, “Rap is black America’s TV station. It gives a whole perspective of what exists and what black life is all about.”

A few years ago it was revealed that Ross had actually been a correctional officer. No one seemed to mind. If a Jew wrote “White Christmas” and a prep-school graduate wrote “Scarface,” why shouldn’t a former cop make the best narco-trafficking anthems of his generation?

The Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred and fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends—the people, say, you’d invite to a large party.

On an even deeper level, there may be a physiological aspect of friendship that virtual connections can never replace. This wouldn’t surprise Dunbar, who discovered his number when he was studying the social bonding that occurs among primates through grooming. Over the past few years, Dunbar and his colleagues have been looking at the importance of touch in sparking the sort of neurological and physiological responses that, in turn, lead to bonding and friendship. “We underestimate how important touch is in the social world,” he said.

So what happens if you’re raised from a young age to see virtual interactions as akin to physical ones? “This is the big imponderable,” Dunbar said. “We haven’t yet seen an entire generation that’s grown up with things like Facebook go through adulthood yet.”

This War Of Mine provides an experience of war seen from an entirely new angle. For the very first time you do not play as an elite soldier, rather a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city. During the day snipers outside stop you from leaving your refuge, so you need to focus on maintaining your hideout. At night you get a chance to scavenge nearby locations for items that will help you stay alive. Make life-and-death decisions driven by your conscience. Try to protect everybody from your shelter or sacrifice some of them to endure the hardships. During war, there are no good or bad decisions; there is only survival. The sooner you realize that, the better.

ostering innovation and helping people to think analytically,

Called simply Bronze, it celebrates a metal so important it has its own age of history attached to it, and so responsive to the artist's skill that it breathes life into gods, humans, mythological creatures and animals with equal success.

It is remarkable to think that had Bronze been mounted say 15 years ago, the portrait of the past that it delivered would have been subtly different. History is very far from a done deal.

On the morning of August 17, 1971, nine young men in the Palo Alto area received visits from local police officers. While their neighbors looked on, the men were arrested for violating Penal Codes 211 and 459 (armed robbery and burglary), searched, handcuffed, and led into the rear of a waiting police car. The cars took them to a Palo Alto police station, where the men were booked, fingerprinted, moved to a holding cell, and blindfolded. Finally, they were transported to the Stanford County Prison—also known as the Stanford University psychology department.

Truly new sensory experiences are rare. Perhaps for that reason, a whole genre of YouTube videos is dedicated to them. The videos of babies tasting lemons are merely heartwarming. Others—the ones showing deaf people activating their cochlear implants, for example, or blind people, after surgery, seeing for the first time—have a power that’s hard to overstate. (A video of Sarah Churman, a young woman from Texas, hearing her own voice has been viewed more than twenty-five million times.) That power flows from a number of sources. The videos are often filmed by family members who are themselves deeply moved. They involve us in a private, intimate, and life-changing moment. They are unusually frank documents of emotion: one doesn’t often see such extremes of surprise, fear, and joy flow so undisguised across an adult face. And, at the same time, they tell part of a larger, communal story about science and its possibilities. (Perhaps this is why patients and their families are so willing to share these otherwise private moments with the rest of us.)

I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called “sanctified culture,” and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but really ought to be called “everyday culture” — the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music I listen to, the movies you see, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so thrilling, so moving — I’ve always believed that these divisions are false.

What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed

We hear the thrum of urban life, overhear the neighbors arguing next door; we eavesdrop, whether we want to or not, on the conversations of co-workers. In medical waiting rooms or hospitals, we’re often privy to nurses and doctors discussing a patient (or, worse, as I experienced recently, to the decidedly un-relaxing sounds of Southern country rock blaring in a mammography clinic). These are things we often don’t want to hear, and with smarter design we shouldn’t have to.Continue reading the main story All of ARUP’s offices have a resource — the Sound Lab — that allows clients to listen to the soundscape of an environment or the acoustics of a space at the early design stages, before that environment or space even exists.

Of course critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is becoming an endangered species of cultural life, as our nonstop, increasingly fractured technological existence wears down our receptive capacities.

Certainly, experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think. Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.This is cool stuff. But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.

Memory Games Memory is malleable, dynamic and elusive. In this hour, TED speakers discuss how a nimble memory can improve your life, and how a frail one might ruin someone else's.

He and his colleagues launched the FastTrack Project to see if they could change students' life trajectory by teaching them what researchers like to call social-emotional intelligence. Back in 1991, they screened 5-year-olds at schools around the country for behavior problems. After interviewing teachers and parents, the researchers identified 900 children who seemed to be most at risk for developing problems later on. Half of these kids went through school as usual — though they had access to free counseling or tutoring. The rest got PATHS lessons, as well as counseling and tutoring, and their parents received training as well — all the way up until the students graduated from high school. By age 25, those who were enrolled in the special program not only had done better in school, but they also had lower rates of arrests and fewer mental health and substance abuse issues. The results of this decades-long study were published in September in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The findings prove, Dodge says, "In the same way that we can teach reading literacy, we can teach social and emotional literacy."

As a result of these shifts in perception, problems arise when a headline is ever so slightly misleading. “Air pollution now leading cause of lung cancer,” ran a headline last year in the U.K. paper Daily Express. The article, however, said no such thing, or, rather, not exactly. Instead, it reported that pollution was a leading “environmental” cause; other causes, like smoking, are still the main culprits. It is easy to understand a decision to run that sort of opening. Caveats don’t fit in single columns, and, once people are intrigued enough to read the story, they’ll get to the nuances just the same. But, as it turns out, reading the piece may not be enough to correct the headline’s misdirection. It’s these sorts of misleading maneuvers that Ullrich Ecker, a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, was pondering when he decided to test how slight—and slightly misleading—shifts in headlines can affect reading. In Ecker’s prior work, he had looked at explicit misinformation: when information that’s biased influences you, no matter what you’re subsequently told. This time around, he wanted to see how nuance and slight misdirection would work.