Opinion | Hurricane Helene: Storm Decision Fatigue Is Getting to Me - The New York Times - 0 views
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For us, decisions about whether to stay or leave and where to go have become more tortuous in ways that may be difficult to understand for those who don’t experience hurricanes regularly.
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Many don’t have the resources to flee monstrous storms such as Helene. But for those who can evacuate, there is a sense of not being able to outrun them or that the destinations may become just as perilous. Every possibility feels both right and wrong and also like disaster deferred for only days — while dithering only shrinks the window for escape.
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more than the sheer repetition of extreme weather, the stakes have grown — for our homes, our communities and our lives. These storms, increasingly supercharged by climate change and hotter water in the Gulf of Mexico, get bigger faster and are more likely to ravage and flood the interior than storms past.
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In Memoriam: Lewis H. Lapham (1935-2024), by Harper's Magazine - 0 views
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By drawing upon the authority of Montaigne, who begins his essay “Of Books” with what would be regarded on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill as a career-ending display of transparency:
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I have no doubt that I often speak of things which are better treated by the masters of the craft, and with more truth. This is simply a trial [essai] of my natural faculties, and not of my acquired ones. If anyone catches me in ignorance, he will score no triumph over me, since I can hardly be answerable to another for my reasonings, when I am not answerable for them to myself, and am never satisfied with them. . . .
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When I was thirty I assumed that by the time I was fifty I would know what I was talking about. The notice didn’t arrive in the mail. At fifty I knew less than what I thought I knew at thirty, and so I figured that by the time I was seventy, then surely, this being America, where all the stories supposedly end in the key of C major, I would have come up with a reason to believe that I had been made wise. Now I’m seventy-five, and I see no sign of a dog with a bird in its mouth.
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What J.D. Vance is learning from Donald Trump - 0 views
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something else is going on, as is suggested by Mr Vance’s zeal for promoting doubts, in retrospect, about the 2020 election: Mr Vance is more discriminating, or more clever, than Mr Trump in when and how he insists on alternative facts. In style and execution he is a much more conventional politician and thus a harbinger of what Mr Trump is making conventional in politics.
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Mr Vance argues that the facts are beside the point because spreading the claims has a higher purpose: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said on CNN on September 15th. He said he meant not that he was making anything up himself but that by amplifying unverified tales he was forcing the press to cover the larger story, of how migrants blight Springfield.
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The Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, has acknowledged that the migration of Haitians, which is legal, has strained Springfield’s services, but argued that it has benefited the community overall by reviving the economy. He may be wrong.
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The Warehouse Worker Who Became a Philosopher - The Atlantic - 0 views
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leven years ago, Stephen West was stocking groceries at a Safeway warehouse in Seattle. He was 24, and had been working to support himself since dropping out of high school at 16. Homeless at times, he had mainly grown up in group homes and foster-care programs up and down the West Coast after being taken away from his family at 9. He learned to find solace in books.
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He would tell himself to be grateful for the work: “It’s manual, physical labor, but it’s better than 99.9 percent of jobs that have ever existed in human history.” By the time most kids have graduated from college, he had consumed “the entire Western canon of philosophy.”
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A notable advantage of packing boxes in a warehouse all day is that rote, solitary work can be accomplished with headphones on. “I would just queue up audio books and listen and pause and think about it and contextualize as much as I could,” he told me. “I was at work for eight hours a day. Seven hours of it would be spent reading philosophy, listening to philosophy; a couple hours interpreting it, just thinking about it. In the last hour of the day, I’d turn on a podcast.”
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Opinion | Gen Z Has Regrets - The New York Times - 0 views
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Was social media a good invention? One way to quantify the value of a product is to find out how many of the people who use it wish it had never been invented. Feelings of regret or resentment are common with addictive products (cigarettes, for example) and addictive activities like gambling, even if most users say they enjoy them.
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What about social media platforms? They achieved global market penetration faster than almost any product in history. The category took hold in the early aughts with Friendster, MySpace and the one that rose to dominance: Facebook. By 2020, more than half of all humans were using some form of social media
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But it turns out that it can be hard for people who don’t like social media to avoid it, because when everyone else is on it, the abstainers begin to miss out on information, trends and gossip
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Opinion | Republican Science Denial Has Nasty Real-World Consequences - The New York Times - 0 views
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In April 2020, 14 percent reported to Pew Research that they had little or no faith that scientists would “act in the best interest of the public.” By October 2023, that figure had risen to 38 percent.
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Over the same period, the share of Democrats who voiced little or no confidence rose much less and from a smaller base line — to 13 percent from 9 percent.
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A paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 31, “Trust in Physicians and Hospitals During the Covid-19 Pandemic in a 50-State Survey of U.S. Adults,” by doctors and health specialists
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Opinion | Yuval Harari: A.I. Threatens Democracy - The New York Times - 0 views
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Large-scale democracies became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.
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This partly explains the current worldwide crisis of democracy. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans can hardly agree on even the most basic facts, such as who won the 2020 presidential election
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As technology has made it easier than ever to spread information, attention became a scarce resource, and the ensuing battle for attention resulted in a deluge of toxic information.
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Social Media and Herd Mentality | Psychology Today - 0 views
Opinion | Harris Gonna Code Switch - The New York Times - 0 views
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language is about reaching into another mind. It’s about connecting.
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Code-switching is one of the ways that humans use language to connect. Using the colloquial dialect of a language serves the same function as drinking or getting a mani-pedi together. It says, “We’re all the same.” It is especially natural, and common, when seeking connection about folksier things or summoning a note of cutting through the nonsense and getting to the heart of things in a “Let’s face it” way.
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This is why many of us readily say “Ain’t gonna happen” even if we aren’t given to saying “ain’t” regularly.
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Unresponsive Brain-Damaged Patients May Have Some Awareness - The New York Times - 0 views
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a mysterious state: eyes open, yet without clear signs of consciousness. Hundreds of thousands of such patients in the United States alone are diagnosed in a vegetative state or as minimally conscious. They may survive for decades without regaining a connection to the outside world.
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Six groups of experts, including Dr. Owen’s and Dr. Schiff’s teams, began collaborating on a survey in 2008. To accelerate it, they figured out how to record brain activity in patients with an electrode-covered cap. It’s much easier to use electrodes to test patients at their bedside than to wheel them into a brain scanner.
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A large study published on Wednesday suggests that a quarter of them are.
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What Don't We Know? | The New Yorker - 0 views
Tipping Carbon Going, Going, Gone? - 0 views
Opinion | Nate Silver on Kamala Harris's Chances and the Mistakes of the 'Indigo Blob' ... - 0 views
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You’ve also called it the indigo blob in different ways. You began to see it as a set of aligned cognitive tendencies that you disagreed with. What were they?
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one of them is the failure to do what I call decoupling. It’s not my term. Decoupling is the act of separating an issue from the context. The example I gave in the book is that if you’re able to say, “I abhor the Chick-fil-A’s C.E.O.’s position on gay marriage” — I don’t know if it’s changed or not, but he was anti-gay marriage at least for some period of time — “but they make a really delicious chicken sandwich.” That’s decoupling
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Or, you can say, you know, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, separate the art from the artist kind of thing. That tendency goes against the tendency on the progressive left to care a lot about the identity of the speaker, in terms of racial or gender identity and in terms of their credentials.
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