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An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.

black and white squares also can make weird nonperiodic patterns, in addition to the familiar, periodic checkerboard pattern. “It’s really pretty trivial to be able to make weird and interesting patterns,” he said. The magic of the two Penrose tiles is that they make only nonperiodic patterns — that’s all they can do.“But then the Holy Grail was, could you do with one — one tile?” Dr. Goodman-Strauss said.

now a new paper — by Mr. Smith and three co-authors with mathematical and computational expertise — proves Mr. Smith’s discovery true. The researchers called their einstein “the hat,

“The most significant aspect for me is that the tiling does not clearly fall into any of the familiar classes of structures that we understand.”

“I’m always messing about and experimenting with shapes,” said Mr. Smith, 64, who worked as a printing technician, among other jobs, and retired early. Although he enjoyed math in high school, he didn’t excel at it, he said. But he has long been “obsessively intrigued” by the einstein problem.

Sir Roger found the proofs “very complicated.” Nonetheless, he was “extremely intrigued” by the einstein, he said: “It’s a really good shape, strikingly simple.”

The simplicity came honestly. Mr. Smith’s investigations were mostly by hand; one of his co-authors described him as an “imaginative tinkerer.”

When in November he found a tile that seemed to fill the plane without a repeating pattern, he emailed Craig Kaplan, a co-author and a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo.

“It was clear that something unusual was happening with this shape,” Dr. Kaplan said. Taking a computational approach that built on previous research, his algorithm generated larger and larger swaths of hat tiles. “There didn’t seem to be any limit to how large a blob of tiles the software could construct,”

The first step, Dr. Kaplan said, was to “define a set of four ‘metatiles,’ simple shapes that stand in for small groupings of one, two, or four hats.” The metatiles assemble into four larger shapes that behave similarly. This assembly, from metatiles to supertiles to supersupertiles, ad infinitum, covered “larger and larger mathematical ‘floors’ with copies of the hat,” Dr. Kaplan said. “We then show that this sort of hierarchical assembly is essentially the only way to tile the plane with hats, which turns out to be enough to show that it can never tile periodically.”

some might wonder whether this is a two-tile, not one-tile, set of aperiodic monotiles.

Dr. Goodman-Strauss had raised this subtlety on a tiling listserv: “Is there one hat or two?” The consensus was that a monotile counts as such even using its reflection. That leaves an open question, Dr. Berger said: Is there an einstein that will do the job without reflection?

“the hat” was not a new geometric invention. It is a polykite — it consists of eight kites. (Take a hexagon and draw three lines, connecting the center of each side to the center of its opposite side; the six shapes that result are kites.)

“It’s likely that others have contemplated this hat shape in the past, just not in a context where they proceeded to investigate its tiling properties,” Dr. Kaplan said. “I like to think that it was hiding in plain sight.”

Incredibly, Mr. Smith later found a second einstein. He called it “the turtle” — a polykite made of not eight kites but 10. It was “uncanny,” Dr. Kaplan said. He recalled feeling panicked; he was already “neck deep in the hat.”

Dr. Myers, who had done similar computations, promptly discovered a profound connection between the hat and the turtle. And he discerned that, in fact, there was an entire family of related einsteins — a continuous, uncountable infinity of shapes that morph one to the next.

this einstein family motivated the second proof, which offers a new tool for proving aperiodicity. The math seemed “too good to be true,” Dr. Myers said in an email. “I wasn’t expecting such a different approach to proving aperiodicity — but everything seemed to hold together as I wrote up the details.”

Mr. Smith was amazed to see the research paper come together. “I was no help, to be honest.” He appreciated the illustrations, he said: “I’m more of a pictures person.”

The idea that there is no way for the vast accumulation of money to “go right” is hardly anywhere to be seen.

extreme wealth remained morally suspect, with the rich bearing particular scrutiny and stigmatization during periods like the Gilded Age. This stigma persisted until relatively recently; only in the 1970s did political shifts cause executive salaries skyrocket, and the current effectively unprecedented inequality in income (and wealth) begin to appear, without any significant public complaint or lament.

The story of how a stigma fades is always murky, but contributing factors are not hard to identify. For one, think tanks have become increasingly partisan over the past several decades, particularly on the right: Certain conservative institutions, enjoying the backing of billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have thrown a ton of money at pseudo-academics and “thought leaders” to normalize and legitimate obscene piles of lucre. They produced arguments that suggest that high salaries naturally flowed from extreme talent and merit, thus baptizing wealth as simply some excellent people’s wholly legitimate rewards. These arguments were happily regurgitated by conservative media figures and politicians, eventually seeping into the broader public and replacing the folk wisdom of yore

there is a plausible reading of Trump’s words that refers to the gang, or similar criminals, not to immigrants in general. But in light of Trump’s history, that surface reading isn’t enough.

the “animals” controversy illustrates a broader truth: It’s a common human failing to characterize outgroups by the worst examples we can find while dismissing our own bad apples as isolated minorities who have nothing to do with the rest of us.

in the succeeding days, he has seemed obsessed with repeating the word “animals” every time the social media storm threatened to die down.

He’s less careful when immigrants are involved. Immigrants actually have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans , yet Trump sure seems to spend an awful lot of time talking about the small fraction who are criminals.

It’s instructive to compare Trump’s harsh language about immigrant “animals” with his response to a direct question about a different group of people behaving badly. After white nationalists staged marches in Charlottesville, culminating in a death, Trump was at pains to distinguish the Nazis from the “people in that group that were there to innocently protest.”

Consider how conservatives feel, for example, when the left focuses disproportionate energy on the tiny portion of the population that belongs to the alt-right or to white-nationalist groups.

Or consider the lingering indignation over Barack Obama’s suggestion that in some small towns in the Midwest and Pennsylvania, where the economy has been devastated by de-industrialization, some people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Obama wasn’t making an abstract observation about human psychology; he was implying that while Democrats come to their views through thoughtful reflection, the Republican rubes simply react to environmental stimulus, like amoebas.

he suspects that Christian faith is other-worldly in the sense of despising material things. Material reality, in his view, is what art celebrates but religion does not. This is to forget that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit. It is also to misunderstand the doctrine of Creation

Adam Phillips writes suggestively of human helplessness as opposed to the sense of protectedness that religious faith supposedly brings us, without noticing that the signifier of God for the New Testament is the tortured and executed corpse of a suspected political criminal.

None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power.

What exactly," he enquires, "does the invocation of some supernatural being add?" A Christian might reply that it adds the obligations to give up everything one has, including one's life, if necessary, for the sake of others. And this, to say the least, is highly inconvenient.

The Christian paradigm of love, by contrast, is the love of strangers and enemies, not of those we find agreeable. Civilised notions such as mutual sympathy, more's the pity, won't deliver us the world we need.

Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.

If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus.

Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place

Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age - if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.

Bush wanted to remake the world. President Trump, by contrast, just wants to make it up as he goes along

Through all their debates over who is to blame for imperiling truth (whether Trump, postmodernism, social media or Fox News), as well as the consequences (invariably dire) and the solutions (usually vague), a few conclusions materialize, should you choose to believe them.

There is a pattern and logic behind the dishonesty of Trump and his surrogates; however, it’s less multidimensional chess than the simple subordination of reality to political and personal ambition

Trump’s untruth sells best precisely when feelings and instincts overpower facts, when America becomes a safe space for fabrication.

Rand Corp. scholars Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich point to the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties and the rise of television in the mid-20th century as recent periods of what they call “Truth Decay” — marked by growing disagreement over facts and interpretation of data; a blurring of lines between opinion, fact and personal experience; and diminishing trust in once-respected sources of information.

In eras of truth decay, “competing narratives emerge, tribalism within the U.S. electorate increases, and political paralysis and dysfunction grow,”

Once you add the silos of social media as well as deeply polarized politics and deteriorating civic education, it becomes “nearly impossible to have the types of meaningful policy debates that form the foundation of democracy.”

To interpret our era’s debasement of language, Kakutani reflects perceptively on the World War II-era works of Victor Klemperer, who showed how the Nazis used “words as ‘tiny doses of arsenic’ to poison and subvert the German culture,” and of Stefan Zweig, whose memoir “The World of Yesterday” highlights how ordinary Germans failed to grasp the sudden erosion of their freedoms.

Kakutani calls out lefty academics who for decades preached postmodernism and social constructivism, which argued that truth is not universal but a reflection of relative power, structural forces and personal vantage points.

postmodernists rejected Enlightenment ideals as “vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking,” Kakutani writes, paving the way for today’s violence against fact in politics and science.

“dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernist thought have been hijacked by Trump’s defenders, who use them to explain away his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises.

intelligent-design proponents and later climate deniers drew from postmodernism to undermine public perceptions of evolution and climate change. “Even if right-wing politicians and other science deniers were not reading Derrida and Foucault, the germ of the idea made its way to them: science does not have a monopoly on the truth,

McIntyre quotes at length from mea culpas by postmodernist and social constructivist writers agonizing over what their theories have wrought, shocked that conservatives would use them for nefarious purposes

pro-Trump troll and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich , who helped popularize the “Pizzagate” lie, has forthrightly cited his unlikely influences. “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college,” Cernovich told the New Yorker in 2016. “If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads [Jacques] Lacan, do I?

When truth becomes malleable and contestable regardless of evidence, a mere tussle of manufactured narratives, it becomes less about conveying facts than about picking sides, particularly in politics.

In “On Truth,” Cambridge University philosopher Simon Blackburn writes that truth is attainable, if at all, “only at the vanishing end points of enquiry,” adding that, “instead of ‘facts first’ we may do better if we think of ‘enquiry first,’ with the notion of fact modestly waiting to be invited to the feast afterward.

He is concerned, but not overwhelmingly so, about the survival of truth under Trump. “Outside the fevered world of politics, truth has a secure enough foothold,” Blackburn writes. “Perjury is still a serious crime, and we still hope that our pilots and surgeons know their way about.

Kavanaugh and Rich offer similar consolation: “Facts and data have become more important in most other fields, with political and civil discourse being striking exceptions. Thus, it is hard to argue that the world is truly ‘post-fact.’ ”

McIntyre argues persuasively that our methods of ascertaining truth — not just the facts themselves — are under attack, too, and that this assault is especially dangerous.

Ideologues don’t just disregard facts they disagree with, he explains, but willingly embrace any information, however dubious, that fits their agenda. “This is not the abandonment of facts, but a corruption of the process by which facts are credibly gathered and reliably used to shape one’s beliefs about reality. Indeed, the rejection of this undermines the idea that some things are true irrespective of how we feel about them.”

“It is hardly a depressing new phenomenon that people’s beliefs are capable of being moved by their hopes, grievances and fears,” Blackburn writes. “In order to move people, objective facts must become personal beliefs.” But it can’t work — or shouldn’t work — in reverse.

More than fearing a post-truth world, Blackburn is concerned by a “post-shame environment,” in which politicians easily brush off their open disregard for truth.

it is human nature to rationalize away the dissonance. “Why get upset by his lies, when all politicians lie?” Kakutani asks, distilling the mind-set. “Why get upset by his venality, when the law of the jungle rules?”

So any opposition is deemed a witch hunt, or fake news, rigged or just so unfair. Trump is not killing the truth. But he is vandalizing it, constantly and indiscriminately, diminishing its prestige and appeal, coaxing us to look away from it.

the collateral damage includes the American experiment.

“One of the most important ways to fight back against post-truth is to fight it within ourselves,” he writes, whatever our particular politics may be. “It is easy to identify a truth that someone else does not want to see. But how many of us are prepared to do this with our own beliefs? To doubt something that we want to believe, even though a little piece of us whispers that we do not have all the facts?”

Colonisation exposed us to new ideas that shocked and confused us. Graeber & Wengrow focus on the French coming into contact with Native Americans in Canada, and in particular on Wendat Confederacy philosopher–statesman Kandiaronk as an example of European traders, missionaries, and intellectuals debating with, and being criticized by indigenous people. Historians have downplayed how much these encounters shaped Enlightenment ideas.

this thought-provoking book is armed to the teeth with fascinating ideas and interpretations that go against mainstream thinking

ather than yet another history book telling you how humanity got here, they take their respective disciplines to task for dealing in myths.

Its legacy, shaped via several iterations, is the modern textbook narrative: hunter-gathering was replaced by pastoralism and then farming; the agricultural revolution resulted in larger populations producing material surpluses; these allowed for specialist occupations but also needed bureaucracies to share and administer them to everyone; and this top-down control led to today’s nation states. Ta-daa!

this simplistic tale of progress ignores and downplays that there was nothing linear or inevitable about where we have ended up.

ake agriculture. Rather than humans enthusiastically entering into what Harari in Sapiens called a Faustian bargain with crops, there were many pathways and responses

Experiments show that plant domestication could have been achieved in as little as 20–30 years, so the fact that cereal domestication here took some 3,000 years questions the notion of an agricultural “revolution”. Lastly, this book includes many examples of areas where agriculture was purposefully rejected. Designating such times and places as “pre-agricultural” is misleading, write the authors, they were anti-agricultural.

The idea that agriculture led to large states similarly needs revision

correlation is not causation, and some 15–20 additional centres of domestication have since been identified that followed different paths. Some cities have previously remained hidden in the sediments of ancient river deltas until revealed by modern remote-sensing technology.

“extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization”

And cities did not automatically imply social stratification. The Dawn of Everything fascinates with its numerous examples of large settlements without ruling classes, such as Ukrainian mega-sites, the Harappan civilization, or Mexican city-states.

These instead relied on collective decision-making through assemblies or councils, which questions some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about scale: that larger human groups require complex (i.e. hierarchical) systems to organize them.

e what is staring them in the face

humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis, spending e.g. part of the year settled in large communal groups under a leader, and another part as small, independently roving bands.

Throughout, Graeber & Wengrow convincingly argue that the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that “there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration […] If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements […] maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?

Next to criticism, the authors put out some interesting ideas of their own, of which I want to quickly highlight two.

The first is that some of the observed variations in social arrangements resulted from schismogenesis. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in the 1930s to describe how people define themselves against or in opposition to others, adopting behaviours and attitudes that are different.

The second idea is that states can be described in terms of three elementary forms of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, which express themselves as sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics.

Asking which past society most resembles today’s is the wrong question to ask. It risks slipping into an exercise in retrofitting, “which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states”

I have left unmentioned several other topics: the overlooked role of women, the legacy of Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s ideas, the origins of inequality and the flawed assumptions hiding behind that question

There are so many historical details and delights hiding between these covers that I was thoroughly enthralle

If you have any interest in big history, archaeology, or anthropology, this book is indispensable. I am confident that the questions and critiques raised here will remain relevant for a long time to come.

I was particularly impressed by the in-depth critique by worbsintowords on his YouTube channel What is Politics? of (so far) five videos

You can think of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as the latest sortie, a takeover of the ultimate wordcel site by the world’s most successful shape rotator.

more likely, he fell prey to a different delusion, one in which the shape rotators and the wordcels are united: thinking of Twitter in terms of words and arguments, as a “digital public square” where vital questions are hashed out. It is that, sometimes, but that’s not what it’s designed for. It’s designed to maximize engagement, which is to say, it’s an addiction machine for the highly verbal.

Both groups theoretically understand what the machine is doing — the wordcels write endless articles about bad algorithms, and the shape rotators build them. But both nonetheless talk as though they’re saving the world even as they compulsively follow the programming. The shape rotators bait the wordcels because that’s what makes the machine spit out more rewarding likes and retweets. We wordcels return the favor for the same reason.

Musk could theoretically rework Twitter’s architecture to downrank provocation and make it less addictive. But of course, that would make it a less profitable business

More to the point, the reason he bought it is that he, like his critics, is hooked on it the way it is now. Unfortunately for Tesla shareholders, Musk has now put himself in the position of a dealer who can spend all day getting high on his own supply.

The idea behind the class is deceptively simple, and many of the lessons — such as gratitude, helping others, getting enough sleep — are familiar.

“A lot of people are waking up, realizing that we’re struggling,

All semester, hundreds of students tried to rewire themselves — to exercise more, to thank their mothers, to care less about the final grade and more about the ideas.

But in ways small and large, silly and heartbreakingly earnest, simple and profound, this class changed the conversation at Yale. It surfaced in late-night talks in dorms, it was dissected in newspaper columns, it popped up, again and again, in memes.

It’s the application that’s difficult, a point Santos made repeatedly: Our brains often lead us to bad choices, and even when we realize the choices are bad, it’s hard to break habits.

There’s no longer the same stigma around mental-health issues, he said. “Now, so many people are admitting they want to lead happier lives.”

In a way, the class is the very essence of a liberal-arts education: learning, exploration, insight into oneself and the world. But many students described it as entirely unlike any class they had ever taken — nothing to do with academics, and everything to do with life.

The impact is not limited to Yale. Stories about PSYC157 spread around the world. Santos created a pared-down version of the class and offered it to anyone on the online education site Coursera.

She taught students about cognitive biases.

“We called it the ways in which our minds suck,” Forti said. “Our minds make us think that certain things make us happy, but they don’t.”

Then, they had to apply the lessons

There was a palpable difference on campus, several students said, during the week when they performed random acts of kindness.

The biggest misconception people have about the class is that Santos is offering some kind of easy happiness fix. “It’s something you have to work on every day. . . . If I keep using these skills, they’ll, over time, help me develop better habits and be happier.

So many students have told her the class changed their lives. “If you’re really grateful, show me that,” she told them. “Change the culture.

for now students stood and clapped and clapped and clapped, beaming, drowning out even Kanye with their standing ovation. As if they had nothing but time.

Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.

The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way

The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

We were led to wonder whether a broken robot can break a child.

Kids are central to the sociable-robot project, because its agenda is to make people more comfortable with robots in roles normally reserved for humans, and robotics companies know that children are vulnerable consumers who can bring the whole family along.

In October, Mattel scrapped plans for Aristotle — a kind of Alexa for the nursery, designed to accompany children as they progress from lullabies and bedtime stories through high school homework — after lawmakers and child advocacy groups argued that the data the device collected about children could be misused by Mattel, marketers, hackers and other third parties. I was part of that campaign: There is something deeply unsettling about encouraging children to confide in machines that are in turn sharing their conversations with countless others.

Recently, I opened my MIT mail and found a “call for subjects” for a study involving sociable robots that will engage children in conversation to “elicit empathy.” What will these children be empathizing with, exactly? Empathy is a capacity that allows us to put ourselves in the place of others, to know what they are feeling. Robots, however, have no emotions to share

What they can do is push our buttons. When they make eye contact and gesture toward us, they predispose us to view them as thinking and caring. They are designed to be cute, to provoke a nurturing response. And when it comes to sociable AI, nurturance is the killer app: We nurture what we love, and we love what we nurture. If a computational object or robot asks for our help, asks us to teach it or tend to it, we attach. That is our human vulnerability.

digital companions don’t understand our emotional lives. They present themselves as empathy machines, but they are missing the essential equipment: They have not known the arc of a life. They have not been born; they don’t know pain, or mortality, or fear. Simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feeling is never feeling, and simulated love is never love.

Breazeal’s position is this: People have relationships with many classes of things. They have relationships with children and with adults, with animals and with machines. People, even very little people, are good at this. Now, we are going to add robots to the list of things with which we can have relationships. More powerful than with pets. Less powerful than with people. We’ll figure it out.

The nature of the attachments to dolls and sociable machines is different. When children play with dolls, they project thoughts and emotions onto them. A girl who has broken her mother’s crystal will put her Barbies into detention and use them to work on her feelings of guilt. The dolls take the role she needs them to take.

Sociable machines, by contrast, have their own agenda. Playing with robots is not about the psychology of projection but the psychology of engagement. Children try to meet the robot’s needs, to understand the robot’s unique nature and wants. There is an attempt to build a mutual relationship.

Some people might consider that a good thing: encouraging children to think beyond their own needs and goals. Except the whole commercial program is an exercise in emotional deception.

when we offer these robots as pretend friends to our children, it’s not so clear they can wink with us. We embark on an experiment in which our children are the human subjects.

it is hard to imagine what those “right types” of ties might be. These robots can’t be in a two-way relationship with a child. They are machines whose art is to put children in a position of pretend empathy. And if we put our children in that position, we shouldn’t expect them to understand what empathy is. If we give them pretend relationships, we shouldn’t expect them to learn how real relationships — messy relationships — work. On the contrary. They will learn something superficial and inauthentic, but mistake it for real connection.

In the process, we can forget what is most central to our humanity: truly understanding each other.

For so long, we dreamed of artificial intelligence offering us not only instrumental help but the simple salvations of conversation and care. But now that our fantasy is becoming reality, it is time to confront the emotional downside of living with the robots of our dreams.

This suggests that the insects understood that “zero” is less than two or three. And they weren’t just going for the empty picture because it was new and interesting

Advanced numerical abilities like this could give animals an evolutionary advantage, helping them keep track of predators and food sources. And if an insect can display such as thorough grasp of the number zero, write the researchers, then this ability may be more common in the animal kingdom than we think.

search could be – and was – personalised, because Google’s algorithms could figure out what each user was most likely to be interested in, and therefore what kinds of information would be most relevant for her or him. So, imperceptibly, but inexorably over time, we have come to live in what Eli Pariser christened a “filter bubble”.

Before the internet, our problem with information was its scarcity. Now our problem is unmanageable abundance. So now the scarce resources are attention and time, over which a vicious war has broken out between traditional media and the internet-based upstarts.

YouTube has a billion users, half of whom access it via mobile devices. The average time spent on the site is 40 minutes. Facebook now claims to have 1.65 billion monthly active users, who spend on average 50 minutes a day on its services. So if Google is an 800lb gorilla, Facebook is a megaton King Kong.

Competition for attention and time is a zero-sum game that traditional media are losing. In desperation, they are trying both to appease Facebook and to harness its hold on people’s attention

In doing so, they have entered into a truly Faustian bargain. Because while publishers can without difficulty ship their stuff to Instant Articles, they cannot control which ones Facebook users actually get to see. This is because users’ news feeds are determined by Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms that try to guess what each user would like to see (and what might dispose them to click on an advertisement).

when you ask – as Professor George Brock memorably did – whether Mark Zuckerberg and his satraps understand that they have acquired editorial responsibilities, they look blank. Facebook is not a publisher, they explain, merely a “platform”. And, besides, no humans are involved in curating users’ news feeds: it’s all done by algorithms and is therefore neutral. In other words: nothing to see here; move on.

Any algorithm that has to make choices has criteria that are specified by its designers. And those criteria are expressions of human values. Engineers may think they are “neutral”, but long experience has shown us they are babes in the woods of politics, economics and ideology.

Guilt signals that we’ve violated morals we believe in; embarrassment shows that we’ve made a fool out of ourselves

We evolved lo earn from emotions and they shape our behavior continually. Fundamentally we try to avoid unpleasant emotions and experience pleasant ones because they indicate situations that are either beneficial or harmful for us.

What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether his fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.

“You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” said Lewandowski, who was another ill-advised CNN hire. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

two other Trump surrogates echoed this sentiment.

Ousted Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, speaking during an election post-mortem at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, blamed journalists for — yes — believing what his candidate said.

“Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.”

but Trump is not a guy at a bar; he was the Republican nominee for president of the United States and will pretty soon be the leader of the free world

When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway about the same election-fraud claim discussed above — specifically, whether disseminating misinformation was “presidential”

“He’s the president-elect, so that’s presidential behavior,” Conway said, using mind-bending pseudo-logic

Conservatives thus embraced Hirsch eagerly and breathlessly. He was a stout defender of the patrimony. Liberals eagerly and breathlessly attacked him with equal vigor. He was retrograde, Eurocentric, racist, sexist.

Lost in all the crossfire, however, were two facts: First, Hirsch, a lifelong Democrat who considered himself progressive, believed his enterprise to be in service of social justice and equality. Cultural illiteracy, he argued, is most common among the poor and power-illiterate, and compounds both their poverty and powerlessness. Second: He was right.

A generation of hindsight now enables Americans to see that it is indeed necessary for a nation as far-flung and entropic as the United States, one where rising economic inequality begets worsening civic inequality, to cultivate continuously a shared cultural core. A vocabulary. A set of shared referents and symbols.

So, first of all, Americans do need a list. But second, it should not be Hirsch’s list. And third, it should not made the way he made his. In the balance of this essay, I want to unpack and explain each of those three statements.

If you take the time to read the book attached to Hirsch’s appendix, you’ll find a rather effective argument about the nature of background knowledge and public culture. Literacy is not just a matter of decoding the strings of letters that make up words or the meaning of each word in sequence. It is a matter of decoding context: the surrounding matrix of things referred to in the text and things implied by it

That means understanding what’s being said in public, in the media, in colloquial conversation. It means understanding what’s not being said. Literacy in the culture confers power, or at least access to power. Illiteracy, whether willful or unwitting, creates isolation from power.

his point about background knowledge and the content of shared public culture extends well beyond schoolbooks. They are applicable to the “texts” of everyday life, in commercial culture, in sports talk, in religious language, in politics. In all cases, people become literate in patterns—“schema” is the academic word Hirsch uses. They come to recognize bundles of concept and connotation like “Party of Lincoln.” They perceive those patterns of meaning the same way a chess master reads an in-game chessboard or the way a great baseball manager reads an at bat. And in all cases, pattern recognition requires literacy in particulars.

Lots and lots of particulars. This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an ideologically controversial point. After all, parents on both left and right have come to accept recent research that shows that the more spoken words an infant or toddler hears, the more rapidly she will learn and advance in school. Volume and variety matter. And what is true about the vocabulary of spoken or written English is also true, one fractal scale up, about the vocabulary of American culture.

those who demonized Hirsch as a right-winger missed the point. Just because an endeavor requires fluency in the past does not make it worshipful of tradition or hostile to change.

radicalism is made more powerful when garbed in traditionalism. As Hirsch put it: “To be conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.”

Hence, he argued, an education that in the name of progressivism disdains past forms, schema, concepts, figures, and symbols is an education that is in fact anti-progressive and “helps preserve the political and economic status quo.” This is true. And it is made more urgently true by the changes in American demography since Hirsch gave us his list in 1987.

If you are an immigrant to the United States—or, if you were born here but are the first in your family to go to college, and thus a socioeconomic new arrival; or, say, a black citizen in Ferguson, Missouri deciding for the first time to participate in a municipal election, and thus a civic neophyte—you have a single overriding objective shared by all immigrants at the moment of arrival: figure out how stuff really gets done here.

So, for instance, a statement like “One hundred and fifty years after Appomattox, our house remains deeply divided” assumes that the reader knows that Appomattox is both a place and an event; that the event signified the end of a war; that the war was the Civil War and had begun during the presidency of a man, Abraham Lincoln, who earlier had famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”; that the divisions then were in large part about slavery; and that the divisions today are over the political, social, and economic legacies of slavery and how or whether we are to respond to those legacies.

But why a list, one might ask? Aren’t lists just the very worst form of rote learning and standardized, mechanized education? Well, yes and no.

it’s not just newcomers who need greater command of common knowledge. People whose families have been here ten generations are often as ignorant about American traditions, mores, history, and idioms as someone “fresh off the boat.”

The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts. It’s not enough for the United States to be a neutral zone where a million little niches of identity might flourish; in order to make our diversity a true asset, Americans need those niches to be able to share a vocabulary. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.

as the pool of potential culture-makers has widened, the modes of culture creation have similarly shifted away from hierarchies and institutions to webs and networks. Wikipedia is the prime embodiment of this reality, both in how the online encyclopedia is crowd-created and how every crowd-created entry contains links to other entries.

so any endeavor that makes it easier for those who do not know the memes and themes of American civic life to attain them closes the opportunity gap. It is inherently progressive.

since I started writing this essay, dipping into the list has become a game my high-school-age daughter and I play together.

I’ll name each of those entries, she’ll describe what she thinks to be its meaning. If she doesn’t know, I’ll explain it and give some back story. If I don’t know, we’ll look it up together. This of course is not a good way for her teachers to teach the main content of American history or English. But it is definitely a good way for us both to supplement what school should be giving her.

And however long we end up playing this game, it is already teaching her a meta-lesson about the importance of cultural literacy. Now anytime a reference we’ve discussed comes up in the news or on TV or in dinner conversation, she can claim ownership. Sometimes she does so proudly, sometimes with a knowing look. My bet is that the satisfaction of that ownership, and the value of it, will compound as the years and her education progress.

The trouble is, there are also many items on Hirsch’s list that don’t seem particularly necessary for entry into today’s civic and economic mainstream.

Which brings us back to why diversity matters. The same diversity that makes it necessary to have and to sustain a unifying cultural core demands that Americans make the core less monochromatic, more inclusive, and continuously relevant for contemporary life

it’s worth unpacking the baseline assumption of both Hirsch’s original argument and the battles that erupted around it. The assumption was that multiculturalism sits in polar opposition to a traditional common culture, that the fight between multiculturalism and the common culture was zero-sum.

As scholars like Ronald Takaki made clear in books like A Different Mirror, the dichotomy made sense only to the extent that one imagined that nonwhite people had had no part in shaping America until they started speaking up in the second half of the twentieth century.

The truth, of course, is that since well before the formation of the United States, the United States has been shaped by nonwhites in its mores, political structures, aesthetics, slang, economic practices, cuisine, dress, song, and sensibility.

In its serious forms, multiculturalism never asserted that every racial group should have its own sealed and separate history or that each group’s history was equally salient to the formation of the American experience. It simply claimed that the omni-American story—of diversity and hybridity—was the legitimate American story.

as Nathan Glazer has put it (somewhat ruefully), “We are all multiculturalists now.” Americans have come to see—have chosen to see—that multiculturalism is not at odds with a single common culture; it is a single common culture.

it is true that in a finite school year, say, with finite class time and books of finite heft, not everything about everyone can be taught. There are necessary trade-offs. But in practice, recognizing the true and longstanding diversity of American identity is not an either-or. Learning about the internment of Japanese Americans does not block out knowledge of D-Day or Midway. It is additive.

As more diverse voices attain ever more forms of reach and power we need to re-integrate and reimagine Hirsch’s list of what literate Americans ought to know.

To be clear: A 21st-century omni-American approach to cultural literacy is not about crowding out “real” history with the perishable stuff of contemporary life. It’s about drawing lines of descent from the old forms of cultural expression, however formal, to their progeny, however colloquial.

Nor is Omni-American cultural literacy about raising the “self-esteem” of the poor, nonwhite, and marginalized. It’s about raising the collective knowledge of all—and recognizing that the wealthy, white, and powerful also have blind spots and swaths of ignorance

What, then, would be on your list? It’s not an idle question. It turns out to be the key to rethinking how a list should even get made.

the Internet has transformed who makes culture and how. As barriers to culture creation have fallen, orders of magnitude more citizens—amateurs—are able to shape the culture in which we must all be literate. Cat videos and Star Trek fan fiction may not hold up long beside Toni Morrison. But the entry of new creators leads to new claims of right: The right to be recognized. The right to be counted. The right to make the means of recognition and accounting.

It is true that lists alone, with no teaching to bring them to life and no expectation that they be connected to a broader education, are somewhere between useless and harmful.

This will be a list of nodes and nested networks. It will be a fractal of associations, which reflects far more than a linear list how our brains work and how we learn and create. Hirsch himself nodded to this reality in Cultural Literacy when he described the process he and his colleagues used for collecting items for their list, though he raised it by way of pointing out the danger of infinite regress.

His conclusion, appropriate to his times, was that you had to draw boundaries somewhere with the help of experts. My take, appropriate to our times, is that Americans can draw not boundaries so much as circles and linkages, concept sets and pathways among them.

Because 5,000 or even 500 items is too daunting a place to start, I ask here only for your top ten. What are ten things every American—newcomer or native born, affluent or indigent—should know? What ten things do you feel are both required knowledge and illuminating gateways to those unenlightened about American life? Here are my entries: Whiteness The Federalist Papers The Almighty Dollar Organized labor Reconstruction Nativism The American Dream The Reagan Revolution DARPA A sucker born every minute

Americans are susceptible to the belief that their country is somehow not a state like other states: It is either something purer and higher, or something unforgivably worse.

Self-accusation is as American as self-assertion—and as based on illusions. America’s strength sways world politics even when it is not exerted.

At present, too, many worry whether this world is safe for democratic societies challenged by the aggressive and illiberal.

A better understanding of history can at least emancipate Americans from the isolationist polemics that caricatured the why and the how of U.S. entry into the First World War

To what extent are we shaped by, and to what degree do we shape, our own brains? And can the brain’s ability to change be harnessed to give us greater cognitive powers? The experiences of many people suggest that it can.

This growth can even happen within a matter of days.

Every time we practice an old skill or learn a new one, existing neural connections are strengthened and, over time, neurons create more connections to other neurons. Even new nerve cells can be generated.

Music is an especially powerful shaping force, for listening to and especially playing it engages many different areas of the brain

Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow

when life is not work, it is play. That's not hard to understand. People are tired, stressed, drained: They want to kick back a little.

Now the kids who were kids when the Western canon went on trial and received summary justice are working the levers of culture. They are the editors and the reviewers and the arts writers and the ones who interview the novelists and the poets

Though the arts interest them, though they read this and they read that—there is one thing that makes them very nervous indeed about what they do. They are not comfortable with judgments of quality. They are not at ease with "the whole evaluation thing."

They may sense that Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience are in some manner more valuable, more worth pondering, more worth preserving than The Simpsons. They may sense as much. But they do not have the terminology to explain why. They never heard the arguments. The professors who should have been providing the arguments when the No More Western Culture marches were going on never made a significant peep.

But entertainment culture suffers no such difficulty. Its rationale is simple, clear, potent: The products of the culture industry are good because they make you feel good.

So the arbiters of culture—our former students—went the logical way. They said: If it makes you feel good, it must be good. If Stephen King and John Grisham bring pleasure, why then, let us applaud them.

What's not asked in the review and the interview and the profile is whether a King book is worth writing or worth reading. It seems that no one anymore has the wherewithal to say that reading a King novel is a major waste of time.

Media no longer seek to shape taste. They do not try to educate the public. And this is so in part because no one seems to know what literary and cultural education would consist of. What does make a book great, anyway? And the media have another reason for not trying to shape taste: It pisses off the readers. They feel insulted, condescended to; they feel dumb.

Even the most august publications and broadcasts no longer attempt to shape taste. They merely seek to reflect it. They hold the cultural mirror up to the reader—what the reader likes, the writer and the editor like. They hold the mirror up and the reader and—what else can he do?—the reader falls in love. The common reader today is someone who has fallen in love, with himself.

Reading in pursuit of influence—that, I think, is the desired thing. It takes a strange mixture of humility and confidence to do as much.

The desire to be influenced is always bound up with some measure of self-dislike, or at least with a dose of discontent. While the culture tells us to love ourselves as we are—or as we will be after we've acquired the proper products and services—the true common reader does not find himself adequate at all.

“Beauty is perfection, to try to perfect yourself more and more every day,” Ms. Mieles said. “That’s how people see it here.” <img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>