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in title, tags, annotations or urlE.D. Hirsch Jr.'s 'Cultural Literacy' in the 21st Century - The Atlantic - 0 views
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much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.
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What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been.
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The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion.
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The Disgust Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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I would like for the most influential swing voter on the Supreme Court to step away from his legal aerie, and wade through some of the muck that he and four fellow justices have given us with the 2014 campaign.
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How did we lose our democracy? Slowly at first, and then all at once. This fall, voters are more disgusted, more bored and more cynical about the midterm elections than at any time in at least two decades.
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beyond disdain for this singular crop of do-nothings, the revulsion is generated by a sense that average people have lost control of one of the last things that citizens should be able to control — the election itself.
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Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture - and Your Mood - The New York Times - 1 views
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Smartphones are ruining our posture. And bad posture doesn’t just mean a stiff neck. It can hurt us in insidious psychological ways.
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Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves, contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August calls the iHunch.
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The average head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds. When we bend our necks forward 60 degrees, as we do to use our phones, the effective stress on our neck increases to 60 pounds — the weight of about five gallons of paint.
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'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views
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Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.
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“It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”
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most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
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Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic - 1 views
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a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough.
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With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.”
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On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.
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Opinion | The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges
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Republican lawmakers try to cancel diversity programs.
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I wrote that right-wing legislatures trying to ban critical race theory from public schools and institutions were a far more direct threat to free speech than what’s often called cancel culture.
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Opinion: The real key to winning this election - CNN - 0 views
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the ghosts seem to be turning out in large numbers to cast their ballots early.
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The long lines are an important reminder that the 2020 election will be won or lost based on the ground game.
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Voting restrictions (photo identification requirements, registration limits and more) that have been imposed in more than 25 states heighten the importance of obtaining as large a margin as possible.
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How to Remember Everything You Want From Non-Fiction Books | by Eva Keiffenheim, MSc | Better Humans | Dec, 2020 | Medium - 0 views
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A Bachelor’s degree taught me how to learn to ace exams. But it didn’t teach me how to learn to remember.
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65% to 80% of students answered “no” to the question “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?”
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the most-popular Coursera course of all time: Dr. Barabara Oakley’s free course on “Learning how to Learn.” So did I. And while this course taught me about chunking, recalling, and interleaving
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The Adams Principle ❧ Current Affairs - 0 views
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This type of glib quasi-logic works really well in comedy, especially in a format where space is restricted, and where the quick, disposable nature of the strip limits your ability to draw humor from character and plot. You take an idea, find a way to subvert or deconstruct it, and you get an absurd result.
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while the idea of a “cubicle job” can seem to younger readers like relative bliss, they were (and are) still an emblem of boredom and absurdity, a sign that life was being slowly colonized by gray shapes and Powerpoint slides. Throughout his classic-era work, Adams hits on the feeling that the world has been made unnatural, unconducive to life; materially adequate, but spiritually exhausting.
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He makes constant use of something I’m going to call, for want of a better term, the sophoid: something which has the outer semblance of wisdom, but none of the substance; something that sounds weighty if you say it confidently enough, yet can be easily thrown away as “just a thought” if it won’t hold up to scrutiny.
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I Was Powerless Over Diet Coke - The New York Times - 0 views
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What makes it so hard to quit?
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two culprits: aspartame and caffeine. Or, to be more precise: addiction to sweetness and to caffeine. Individually, they’re bad; together, they’re an addict’s nightmare.
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A 12-ounce can of regular Coke has 34 milligrams of caffeine, whereas Diet Coke has 11 milligrams more, according to Coca-Cola. (An 8-ounce cup of coffee has about 95 mg.) Artificial sweeteners activate the brain’s reward system, but only about half as much as regular sugar, said Dr. Peeke. Faux sugar doesn’t pack the same wallop as the real stuff, so it keeps you wanting more and more.
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Opinion | What's Ripping American Families Apart? - The New York Times - 0 views
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At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point.
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The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child. A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain.
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the children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event
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Climate Change Obsession Is a Real Mental Disorder - WSJ - 0 views
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If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are
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Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.
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it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.
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Netanyahu's Dark Worldview - The Atlantic - 0 views
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as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.
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“You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”
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The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.
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How the Internet Is Like a Dying Star - 0 views
Plagues of the Body and Plagues of the Mind - The Bulwark - 0 views
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Though Pamuk is playful where Tolstoy is strident, behind all the beautiful descriptions of Mingherian flowers and mountains of rose-colored marble, he is undeniably making an argument. If Tolstoy’s great theme in War and Peace is the powerlessness of humanity to remake the world through acts of will alone, Pamuk’s is the role of accident in shaping history and its writing. Tolstoy’s enemy was Napoleon, the embodiment of modernity’s hubris. Pamuk’s is the historiographic crimes of nationalism.
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This is a bold thing to say in Turkey, a country that has gone to great lengths to promulgate a heroic and highly sanitized account of its founding. It is even bolder when one notes that Mingheria’s struggle for independence, and its troubled post-independence history, function very well as an allegory of Turkey itself. Major Kâmil is, like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an Ottoman war hero and secularist who tries to found a country divided by ethnic and religious rivalries on a conception of linguistic and ethnic nationalism.
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Mingheria becomes independent not only through the great accident of the plague, but also through thousands of tiny accidents at crucial moments. The problem with nations, the book suggests, is that they take all these small instances in which things could just as well have been otherwise and cast them as a monumental inevitability. Once a nation-state comes into existence, the machinery of education and civic ritual and the instruments of propaganda and state violence are wielded to turn chance into fate. And that fate becomes inexorable.
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Opinion | Empathy Is Exhausting. There Is a Better Way. - The New York Times - 0 views
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“What can I even do?”Many people are feeling similarly defeated, and many others are outraged by the political inaction that ensues. A Muslim colleague of mine said she was appalled to see so much indifference to the atrocities and innocent lives lost in Gaza and Israel. How could anyone just go on as if nothing had happened?
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inaction isn’t always caused by apathy. It can also be the product of empathy. More specifically, it can be the result of what psychologists call empathic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help.
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I felt it intensely this fall, as violence escalated abroad and anger echoed across the United States. Helpless as a teacher, unsure of how to protect my students from hostility and hate. Useless as a psychologist and writer, finding words too empty to offer any hope. Powerless as a parent, searching for ways to reassure my kids that the world is a safe place and most people are good. Soon I found myself avoiding the news altogether and changing the subject when war came up
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