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Less commonly understood, however, is how thoroughly the research into this profound, abstruse and seemingly otherworldly theory was shaped by the messy human dramas of the past century.

Some of the barriers to acceptance were conceptual.

But other obstacles were political. The turmoil and disruptions of World War I, for example, prevented many people from learning and thinking about general relativity

newish is the rhetoric of unreality, the insistence, chiefly by Democrats, that some politicians are incapable of perceiving the truth because they have an epistemological deficit: they no longer believe in evidence, or even in objective reality.

the past of proof is strange and, on its uncertain future, much in public life turns. In the end, it comes down to this: the history of truth is cockamamie, and lately it’s been getting cockamamier.

. Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

"A leading brain scientist in England points out that texting actually decreases the ability to think in complex ways because it eliminates complexity in sentence structure. Put it all together and it seems that no one has patience to sit quietly and read a book, as we might have a generation or even ten years ago."

"People are publishing books that are radically shorter than in the past," he says.

But books aren't just getting shorter, says Levin. What the reader wants from the author is changing too.

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

Boys with eccentric parents—not to mention boys who love fantasy fiction—tend to develop a sense of empathy, partly because they know what it’s like to be the weird kid at school

After Harvard, Douthat lived with Reihan Salam, who became his coauthor on the 2008 book Grand New Party, a set of prescriptions for the embattled GOP. Salam, a secular Muslim from working-class Brooklyn, related easily to Douthat. “He, too, came from a marginal place,” Salam tells me. “He didn’t have the classic upbringing you’d expect from an Ivy League student. It has given him a kind of outsider take.”

Douthat does have a Catholic’s profound sense that sin is real, and he is always on high alert for the perversion of virtue.

Marx’s works, including “The Communist Manifesto”, written with Friedrich Engels in 1848, may have had more impact on the modern world than many suppose. Of the manifesto’s ten principal demands, perhaps four have been met in many rich countries, including “free education for all children in public schools” and a “progressive or graduated income tax”.

Mr Stedman Jones’s book is above all an intellectual biography, which focuses on the philosophical and political context in which Marx wrote.

Marx did not invent communism. Radicals, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) and the Chartist movement in England, had long used language that modern-day readers would identify as “Marxist”—“to enjoy political equality, abolish property”; “reserve army of labour” and so forth.

Faith is a concept that often enters the accounts of GPS-induced mishaps. “It kept saying it would navigate us a road,” said a Japanese tourist in Australia who, while attempting to reach North Stradbroke Island, drove into the Pacific Ocean. A man in West Yorkshire, England, who took his BMW off-road and nearly over a cliff, told authorities that his GPS “kept insisting the path was a road.” In perhaps the most infamous incident, a woman in Belgium asked GPS to take her to a destination less than two hours away. Two days later, she turned up in Croatia.

These episodes naturally inspire incredulity, if not outright mockery. After a couple of Swedes mistakenly followed their GPS to the city of Carpi (when they meant to visit Capri), an Italian tourism official dryly noted to the BBC that “Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat.” An Upper West Side blogger’s account of the man who interpreted “turn here” to mean onto a stairway in Riverside Park was headlined “GPS, Brain Fail Driver.”

several studies have demonstrated empirically what we already know instinctively. Cornell researchers who analyzed the behavior of drivers using GPS found drivers “detached” from the “environments that surround them.” Their conclusion: “GPS eliminated much of the need to pay attention.”

China sanctions UK lawmakers and entities in retaliation for Xinjiang measures

China has issued more retaliatory sanctions over Xinjiang, targeting individuals and entities in the United Kingdom it says "maliciously spread lies and disinformation" regarding Beijing's treatment of Uyghur Muslims.

China's foreign ministry said the UK had "imposed unilateral sanctions on relevant Chinese individuals and entity, citing the so-called human rights issues in Xinjiang."

side from depriving schoolchildren of the sheer fun of a snow day, climate change could lead the popular imaginary of British winters into uncharted territory.

By studying weather observations and stories carefully recorded in diaries, letters and newspapers, it’s possible to trace winter’s icy fingerprints on the human drama.

During the winter of 1794-1795, temperatures struggled to climb above freezing, hovering at a daily average of 0.5°C

Students who are wealthier and male are more likely than others to claim that they know more than they actually do, says a new study.

The study, which reviewed surveys of 40,000 15-year-old students from across nine English-speaking countries, found that boys and people from wealthier families are more likely to be “bullshitters,” which it defines as “individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience at all.”

“You’re claiming expertise in things you have absolutely no knowledge of,” says Shure. “You couldn’t. These things don’t exist.”

Confirmation bias is a ubiquitous phenomenon, the effects of which have been traced as far back as Pythagoras’ studies of harmonic relationships in the 6th century B.C. (Nickerson, 1998), and is referenced in the writings of William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon (Risinger, Saks, Thompson, & Rosenthal, 2002). It is also a problematic phenomenon, having been implicated in “a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations” throughout human history, including the witch trials of Western Europe and New England, and the perpetuation of inaccurate medical diagnoses, ineffective medical treatments, and erroneous scientific theories (Nickerson, 1998, p. 175).

For over a century, psychologists have observed that people naturally favor information that is consistent with their beliefs or desires, and ignore or discount evidence to the contrary. In an article titled “The Mind’s Eye,” Jastrow (1899) was among the first to explain how the mind plays an active role in information processing, such that two individuals with different mindsets might interpret the same information in entirely different ways (see also Boring, 1930). Since then, a wealth of empirical research has demonstrated that confirmation bias affects how we perceive visual stimuli (e.g., Bruner & Potter, 1964; Leeper, 1935), how we gather and evaluate evidence (e.g., Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979; Wason, 1960), and how we judge—and behave toward—other people (e.g., Asch, 1946; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966; Snyder & Swann, 1978).

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

Scientists are sending the U.S. a warning: What's happening right now in the United Kingdom with the new coronavirus variant could likely happen in the U.S., and the country has a short window to prepare.

"I think a lot of countries are looking at the U.K. right now and saying, 'Oh, isn't that too bad that it's happening there, just like we did with Italy in February.

"But we've seen in this pandemic a few times that, if the virus can happen somewhere else, it can probably happen in your country, too."

For the most part, though, officials tended to ignore the society’s complaints, saying that they had more pressing matters to deal with than a missing apostrophe here or there. And experts in language and cognition concurred, pointing out that a misplaced apostrophe was unlikely to confuse anybody, and, in fact, apostrophes could likely be eliminated from written English altogether with no ill effect.

Over the years, fans have submitted examples such a cafe advertising “light bite’s,” a warehouse offering storage for “boat’s” and “car’s,” and a restaurant selling “snow pea’s.

For MacIntyre, “rationality” comprises all the intellectual resources, both formal and substantive, that we use to judge truth and falsity in propositions, and to determine choice-worthiness in courses of action

Rationality in this sense is not universal; it differs from community to community and from person to person, and may both develop and regress over the course of a person’s life or a community’s history.

So rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history: indeed, since there are also a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than justice