The Unheeded Message of ‘1984’

Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance.

[…]

Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

[…]

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: … [ Read more ]

Author: George Packer
Source: The Atlantic (June 8, 2019)
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Literature | Arts, Politics & Public Policy

Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die

The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now … [ Read more ]

Author: Ed Yong
Source: The Atlantic (August 5, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine

Coronavirus and COVID-19 Trackers and Articles

Last Updated: April 11, 2022

Here is a list of COVID-19 tracking tools and other useful articles and resources about Coronavirus and COVID-19. I don’t claim this to be authoritative or anywhere near complete. It’s merely a collection of the better things I have read over the past months. I compiled this list mostly for my own reference but if it can be of value to … [ Read more ]

Subject: Health & Medicine

The Four Quadrants of Conformism

One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Graham
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

When White Supremacists Overthrew a Government

In November 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, a mob of 2,000 white men expelled black and white political leaders, destroyed the property of the city’s black residents, and killed dozens — if not hundreds — of people.

For decades, the story of this violence was buried, while the perpetrators were cast as heroes.

Source: Vox (June 20, 2020)
Subjects: History, Race Relations

Why Your Christian Friends and Family Members Are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories

Three primary reasons people are attracted to conspiracy theories:

  1. Conspiracy theories make us feel special. According to Tom Nichols, “[Conspiracy] theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism: there are people who would choose to believe in complicated nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are incomprehensible, the result of issues beyond their intellectual capacity to understand, or even their own fault.” In other

… [ Read more ]

Author: Joe Forrest
Source: Instrument of Mercy (May 7, 2020)
Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: The rise and fall of the five stages of grief

In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote the book On Death and Dying. In it, she began by describing how patients talk about dying, and went on to discuss how end-of-life care could be improved.

The part of it that stuck in the public imagination was the idea that when a person is diagnosed with a terminal illness they go through a series of emotional stages.

Kübler-Ross described five … [ Read more ]

Authors: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Lucy Burns
Source: BBC (July 3, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior

5 Hindrances of Self-mastery

One of the most important [Shaolin] teachings is the “five hindrances of self-mastery.” These are the core mental states that prevent us from seeing clearly, making smart decisions, achieving our goals and living a happier, more harmonious life.

  1. Sensual desire. Sensual desire is intertwined pleasure, and it arises when we have a deep craving for something that stimulates one or more of our five senses (vision,

… [ Read more ]

Author: Shi Heng Yi
Source: CNBC (June 17, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The Antidote to Prejudice: Walter Lippmann on Overriding the Mind’s Propensity for Preconceptions

Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.

Drawing on the pioneering psychologist William James […] Lippmann writes:

For the most part we do not first

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Popova, Walter Lippmann
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 4, 2019)
Subjects: Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge

The Psychology of Social Rule: Pioneering Sociologist Elsie Clews Parsons’s Prophetic Century-Old Study of Power, the Rise of Divisiveness, and Why We Classify Ourselves and Others

Years before Walter Lippmann explored stereotypes and the psychology of prejudice, rooted in the disquieting fact that “we do not first see, and then define, [but] define first and then see,” and decades before Hannah Arendt observed that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” before she … [ Read more ]

Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (March 11, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Immigration, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology

Movement Conservative Movement

After World War II, so many Americans believed in the new, activist New Deal state, the “liberal consensus,” that politicians could not motivate voters with sweeping stories of what it meant to be an American: almost all Americans agreed on those basic principles. So political scientists concluded that there was no longer any real defining ideological difference between Republicans and Democrats. In a famous book … [ Read more ]

Author: Heather Cox Richardson
Source: Facebook (February 9, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

Education Solutions

Matt Miller is right that “localist” arrangements in education deliver maximum power to teachers’ unions (“First, Kill All the School Boards,” January/February 2008 Atlantic), which can draw on national resources and political connections, stultifying attempts at real improvement. But in a national system, the fashionable, counterevidential theo­ries of the technocratic elite remain beyond correction since, being national, they have been removed from competition.

So try … [ Read more ]

Author: M. T. Pearse
Source: The Atlantic (April2008)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

The Joe Rogan controversy revealed something important about the American left

Within the field of moral philosophy, the main rival to deontology [the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action] is a school of thought known as “consequentialism.” In this view, the morality of actions must be judged by their consequences: … [ Read more ]

Author: Dylan Matthews
Source: Vox (January 27, 2020)
Subjects: Excerpts, Philosophy, Politics & Public Policy

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

[…]

Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession: there is no point. A bus ticket collector’s love is disinterested. They’re not doing it to impress us or to … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Graham
Subjects: Ability | Skill, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution

Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. [James] Burnham does not deny that ‘good’ motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, … [ Read more ]

Author: George Orwell
Source: Polemic (May1946)
Subjects: Excerpts, History, Politics & Public Policy

The Attachment Secret: Are You a Secure, Avoidant, or Anxious Partner?

There are three major styles of attachment: secure, anxious and avoidant. […] A person’s attachment style is largely influenced by whether or not they bonded successfully with their primary caregivers – parents or otherwise – in childhood, though more recent research suggests that genes, and our romantic history as adults, may also be influential factors. Analysis of studies in North America and Europe found that … [ Read more ]

Author: Elle Hunt
Source: The Guardian (November 5, 2019)
Subjects: Character, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

There are 3 Types of Arrogance

Researchers have created a new way to classify arrogance on different levels across a spectrum.

The team acknowledges everyone seems to have some degree of arrogance, so in addition to the literature review, the researchers suggest a way to classify the different levels of arrogance a person could exhibit.

The team devised a system that identifies three types of arrogance:

  • Individual arrogance—an inflated

… [ Read more ]

Author: Eric Stann
Source: Futurity (October 22, 2019)
Subjects: Attitude, Character, Psychology | Behavior

Our Culture of Contempt

A 2014 article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on “motive attribution asymmetry” — the assumption that your ideology is based in love, while your opponent’s is based in hate — suggests an answer. The researchers found that the average Republican and the average Democrat today suffer from a level of motive attribution asymmetry that is comparable with that of Palestinians and … [ Read more ]

Author: Arthur C. Brooks
Source: The New York Times (March 2, 2019)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Beating the Market

You’ve heard it a million times: Nobody can beat the stock market, so just stash your investment dollars in index mutual funds and settle for “the average return.” Behind that nostrum is the so-called efficient market theory, which holds that stock prices already reflect all the available information about a company, making it impossible for anybody to get a leg up.

Efficient market theory no longer … [ Read more ]

Author: Robert A. Jaeger
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Finance | Investing

Why Radicals Can’t Recognize When They’re Wrong

New research published in Current Biology confirms this feeling: people with radical beliefs actually think differently than those without. Specifically, radicals have less metacognitive sensitivity than moderates.

Metacognition refers to the ability to be aware of and analyze one’s own thinking. Metacognitive sensitivity is similar, but more specific: it refers to the ability to distinguish between one’s correct and incorrect judgements.

[…]‌

First, the researchers developed … [ Read more ]

Author: Matt Davis
Source: Big Think (February 15, 2019)
Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

Caring for Your Introvert

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted … [ Read more ]

Author: Jonathan Rauch
Source: The Atlantic (March2003)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Psychology | Behavior