Welcome the new world with open arms—and browsers.
Author: Tyler Cowen | Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2009) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Information, Life & Society, Perspective, Productivity & Time Management, Thought | Inquiry
On December 18, 1988, twenty-five years after his writing had been denounced as “anti-Soviet” in his native Russia and mere months after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity,” prolific poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940–January 28, 1996) took the podium at Ann Arbor and addressed the graduating class at the University … [ Read more ]
Authors: Joseph Brodsky, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 18, 2013) | Subjects: Advice, Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoting a California judicial opinion, told the Supreme Court in 1971, “the pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.” When we declare that men will always be brutes and women can only shrug from on high, we engage in what President George W. Bush once called the soft bigotry … [ Read more ]
Author: Irin Carmon | Source: The New York Times (December 9, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Feminism, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
When a society has shed its crutches of inequality in a relatively short period — from finally recognizing the dignity of all love with marriage equality to finally taking stock of a generations-old wound with Black Lives Matter — vast swaths of the population are perhaps bound to find the rate of change intolerable, bound to find themselves tossed into a brave new world that … [ Read more ]
Authors: H.L. Mencken, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 11, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy
Here is a small treasury of excerpts from some of the addresses Theodore Roosevelt gave during his lifetime. When you look at anthologies of all his speeches, you find that the themes he hits in these selections were the ones he offered, with only slight alterations, over and over and over again, in every town and city he visited on country-crossing whistle stop tours. You’ll … [ Read more ]
Authors: Brett McKay, Kate McKay, Theodore Roosevelt | Source: The Art of Manliness (November 7, 2016) | Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Excerpts, History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
In 1908, Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das wrote to Leo Tolstoy, by then one of the most famous public figures in the world, asking for the author’s support in India’s independence from British colonial rule. On December 14, Tolstoy, who had spent the last twenty years seeking the answers to life’s greatest moral questions, was moved to reply in a long letter, which Das published in … [ Read more ]
Author: Leo Tolstoy | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 21, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, History, Life & Society, Love, Sociology | Anthropology
[The] trend toward rationality and enlightenment was endangered long before the advent of the Internet. As Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the rise of television introduced not just a new medium but a new discourse: a gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn meant a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment. … [ Read more ]
Author: Hossein Derakhshan | Source: WIRED (October 19, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Communication, Culture, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
“What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”
Authors: Joseph Brodsky, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (October 25, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Good & Evil, Insight, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong.
Author: Sarah Smarsh | Source: The Guardian (October 13, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Journalism, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology
When she was 30, Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realize that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does.
Author: Suzy Hansen | Source: The Guardian (August 8, 2017) | Subjects: America, Culture, Demographics, Excerpts, International, Life & Society, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology
Certain universal moral precepts may be biologically dictated as well. One such rule is at play in an ethical puzzle known as “the trolley problem.” Researchers pose the dilemma to subjects this way: A trolley barreling down a hill is headed straight for five people who have been tied to the tracks, but you can pull a switch to move the trolley onto a path … [ Read more ]
Author: Marc D. Hauser | Sources: Nature, The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2009) | Note(s): Original Source: “The Possibility of Impossible Cultures” | Nature, July 9, 2009. | Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture, Sociology | Anthropology