Group items tagged

It’s useful to keep in mind that Twitter is an amplification machine. It is built to allow people, with astonishingly little effort, to reach many other people. (This is why brands like it.)

There are a million other ways to express yourself online: This has nothing to do with free speech, and Twitter is not obligated to protect your First Amendment rights.

When Elon Musk and his fans talk about free speech on Twitter, they’re actually talking about loud speech. Who is allowed to use this technology to make their message very loud, to the exclusion of other messages?

‘We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887

This seeking after ourselves, however, is not something that is lacking in Buddhist and Confucian traditions – especially not in the case of Korean philosophy. Self-cultivation, central to the tradition, underscores that the onus is on the individual to develop oneself, without recourse to the divine or the supernatural

Korean philosophy is practical, while remaining agnostic to a large degree: recognising the spirit realm but highlighting that we ourselves take charge of our lives by taking charge of our minds

In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies.

Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one.

he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.

the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage

The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years

During the 20th century, the list got much longer. In came existential crises, midlife crises, energy crises and environmental crises. When Koselleck was writing about the subject in the 1970s, he counted up more than 200 kinds of crisis we could then face

This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.

Daunt used the pandemic as an opportunity to “weed out the rubbish” in the stores. He asked employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay. Every section of the store needed to be refreshed and made appealing.

Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”

For some perspective on what’s happening with Elon Musk and Twitter, I suggest spending a few minutes familiarizing yourself with one of Twitter’s sillier episodes from the past, a fight that erupted almost a year ago between the “shape rotators” of Silicon Valley and the “wordcels” (aspersion intended) of journalism and related professions. Many of the combatants were, at first, merely fighting over which group should have higher social status (theirs), but the episode also highlighted real divisions between West Coast and East — math and verbal, free-speech culture and safety culture, people who make things happen and people who talk about them afterward.

For years now, conflict between the two groups has been boiling over onto social media, into courtrooms and onto the pages of major news outlets. Team Shape Rotator believes Team Wordcel is parasitic and dangerous, ballyragging institutions into curbing both free speech and innovation in the name of safety. Team “Stop calling me a Wordcel” sees its opponents as self-centered and reckless, disrupting and mean-meming their way toward some vaguely imagined doom.

his audacity seems to be backfiring, as of course did Napoleon’s eventually.

In the old days—and here I mean even as recently as 2000 or 2004—audiences were built around media institutions. The New York Times had an audience. The New Yorker had an audience. The Weekly Standard had an audience.

If you were a writer, you got access to these audiences by contributing to the institutions. No one cared if you, John Smith, wrote a piece about Al Gore. But if your piece about Al Gore appeared in Washington Monthly, then suddenly you had an audience.

There were a handful of star writers for whom this wasn’t true: Maureen Dowd, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion. Readers would follow these stars wherever they appeared. But they were the exceptions to the rule. And the only way to ascend to such exalted status was by writing a lot of great pieces for established institutions and slowly assembling your audience from theirs.

Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

Jenn, however, has complicated things by adding an unexpected topic to her repertoire: the dangers of social media. She recently spoke about disengaging from it for her well-being; she also posted an Instagram Story about the risks of ChatGPT

and, in none other than a YouTube video, recommended Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, a seminal piece of media critique from 1985 that denounces television’s reduction of life to entertainment.

(Her other book recommendations included Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, and Recapture the Rapture, by Jamie Wheal.)

Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria.

Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.

Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being

Incels (as they’re known) are infamous for sharing misogynistic attitudes and bitter hostility toward the romantically successful

somehow, incels’ hateful rhetoric has bizarrely become popularized via Gen Z slang.

it’s common to hear the suffix “pilled” as a funny way to say “convinced into a lifestyle.” Instead of “I now love eating burritos,” for instance, one might say, “I’m so burritopilled.” “Pilled” as a suffix comes from a scene in 1999’s “The Matrix” where Neo (Keanu Reeves) had to choose between the red pill and the blue pill, but the modern sense is formed through analogy with “blackpilled,” an online slang term meaning “accepting incel ideology.

The same inflationary forces that pushed these prices higher have also pushed wages to be 22 percent higher than on the eve of the pandemic. Official statistics show that the stuff that a typical American buys now costs 20 percent more over the same period. Some prices rose a little more, some a little less, but they all roughly rose in parallel.

It follows that the typical worker can now afford two percent more stuff. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a faster rate of improvement than the average rate of real wage growth over the past few decades.

many folks feel that they’re falling behind, even when a careful analysis of the numbers suggests they’re not.

In short, narcissism is a drive to feel special and unique.

To some extent, narcissistic traits exist in all of us, and a little narcissism isn’t a bad thing. In fact, research has shown that viewing ourselves through rose-colored glasses, a concept known as self-enhancement, can help us cope with adversity.

Narcissism is most problematic when people become dependent on the feeling of superiority and seek it at all costs, displaying what Dr. Malkin calls the “triple E”: entitlement, exploitation and a lack of empathy.