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in title, tags, annotations or urlWhy Trump Supporters Aren't Backing Down - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Almost all of Trump’s supporters want to cast their gaze elsewhere—on some other issue, on some other hearing, on some other controversy. They’ll do anything to keep from having to confront the reality of what happened on January 6. What you’re very unlikely to see, except in the rarest of cases, is genuine self-reflection or soul-searching, regret or remorse, feelings of embarrassment and shame.
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Trump supporters have spent much of the past half dozen years defending their man; their political and cultural identity has become fused with his. Some of them may have started out as lukewarm allies, but over time their support became less qualified and more enthusiastic. The unusual intensity of the Trump years increased their bond to him.
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He was the captain of Team Red. In their minds, loyalty demanded they stick with him, acting as his shield one day, his sword the next.
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Some on the Left Turn Against the Label 'Progressive' - The New York Times - 0 views
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Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, posed a banger of a question in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.”
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“How does it happen,” Lasch asked, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”
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A review in The New York Times Book Review by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard, was titled: “Where Has Progress Got Us?”
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Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes.
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Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.
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the decline in cursive seems inevitable. Writing is, after all, a technology, and most technologies are sooner or later surpassed and replaced.
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An Existential Problem in the Search for Alien Life - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The fact is, we still don’t know what life is.
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since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things.
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If you say life consumes fuel to sustain itself with energy, you risk including fire; if you demand the ability to reproduce, you exclude mules. NASA hasn’t been able to do better than a working definition: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
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The Perks of Taking the High Road - The Atlantic - 0 views
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hat is the point of arguing with someone who disagrees with you? Presumably, you would like them to change their mind. But that’s easier said than done
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Research shows that changing minds, especially changing beliefs that are tied strongly to people’s identity, is extremely difficult
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this personal attachment to beliefs encourages “competitive personal contests rather than collaborative searches for the truth.”
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George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of antisocial selfishness
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the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.
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What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias, and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers
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How to Make Friends as an Adult - The Atlantic - 0 views
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According to “The Friendship Report,” a global study commissioned by Snapchat in 2019, the average age at which we meet our best friends is 21—a stage when we’re not only bonding over formative new experiences such as first love and first heartbreak, but also growing more discerning about whom we befriend.
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young adulthood is a time when many of us have time.
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it typically takes more than 200 hours, ideally over six weeks, for a stranger to grow into a close friend.
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Elon Musk Doesn't Want Transparency on Twitter - The Atlantic - 0 views
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, the Twitter Files do what technology critics have long done: point out a mostly intractable problem that is at the heart of our societal decision to outsource broad swaths of our political discourse and news consumption to corporate platforms whose infrastructure and design were made for viral advertising.
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The trolling is paramount. When former Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory leader Alex Stamos asked whether Musk would consider implementing his detailed plan for “a trustworthy, neutral platform for political conversations around the world,” Musk responded, “You operate a propaganda platform.” Musk doesn’t appear to want to substantively engage on policy issues: He wants to be aggrieved.
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it’s possible that a shred of good could come from this ordeal. Musk says Twitter is working on a feature that will allow users to see if they’ve been de-amplified, and appeal. If it comes to pass, perhaps such an initiative could give users a better understanding of their place in the moderation process. Great!
Francis Fukuyama: Still the End of History - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.
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The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences
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Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.
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It's Not Just the Discord Leak. Group Chats Are the Internet's New Chaos Machine. - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011.
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As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”
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unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.
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Elon Musk May Kill Us Even If Donald Trump Doesn't - 0 views
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In his extraordinary 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at Brookings, writes that modern societies have developed an implicit “epistemic” compact–an agreement about how we determine truth–that rests on a broad public acceptance of science and reason, and a respect and forbearance towards institutions charged with advancing knowledge.
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Today, Rauch writes, those institutions have given way to digital “platforms” that traffic in “information” rather than knowledge and disseminate that information not according to its accuracy but its popularity. And what is popular is sensation, shock, outrage. The old elite consensus has given way to an algorithm. Donald Trump, an entrepreneur of outrage, capitalized on the new technology to lead what Rauch calls “an epistemic secession.”
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Rauch foresees the arrival of “Internet 3.0,” in which the big companies accept that content regulation is in their interest and erect suitable “guardrails.” In conversation with me, Rauch said that social media companies now recognize that their algorithm are “toxic,” and spoke hopefully of alternative models like Mastodon, which eschews algorithms and allows users to curate their own feeds
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A Leading Memory Researcher Explains How to Make Precious Moments Last - The New York Times - 0 views
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Our memories form the bedrock of who we are. Those recollections, in turn, are built on one very simple assumption: This happened. But things are not quite so simple
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“We update our memories through the act of remembering,” says Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the illuminating new book “Why We Remember.” “So it creates all these weird biases and infiltrates our decision making. It affects our sense of who we are.
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Rather than being photo-accurate repositories of past experience, Ranganath argues, our memories function more like active interpreters, working to help us navigate the present and future. The implication is that who we are, and the memories we draw on to determine that, are far less fixed than you might think. “Our identities,” Ranganath says, “are built on shifting sand.”
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