We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago. Caleb Crain reacts to The National Endowment of the Arts (N.E.A.) recent report on American reading patterns that connects declines in reading with civic, social, and economic implications and asks what society might be like if only a few elite people read literary texts as a hobby.
Medical Myths
Heard the one about using only 10% of our brains? Not true. Doctors pour cold water on this and 6 other medical myths in the British Medical Journal. These myths were based on ideas the authors had heard endorsed on several occasions, and which many physicians thought were true. But after we carefully lay out medical evidence, they are very willing to accept that these beliefs are actually false.
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The Polarization of Extremes
Cass Sunstein argues that the ability to filter information on the internet is going to lead to a world of fractured communications, group polarizations, cascades of false information, finally resulting in a rise in extremism. It’s a relief to hear arguments that do not see the internet as an ideal force for democracy, but his argument relies on “perfect filtering,” without any explanation for how this is even possible.
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A Hunger For Books
Doris Lessing has been a lifelong advocate from freedom, democracy and human decency. So it is a little disheartening that in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature she has not interpreted some of the big cultural changes in the context of technology, such as diversity, lifelong learning, participation and citizenship.
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A DNA Driven World
Geneticist Craig Venter: …the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence
. Whether or not designer microbes that replace coal and oil are part of the solution, such disruptive ideas and technologies that let us adapt to and mitigate climate change are. We need a scientifically literate society willing to embrace change. But here’s the problem: Science is a topic which can cause people to turn off their brains. I contend that science has failed to excite more people for at least two reasons: it is frequently taught poorly, often as rote memorization of complex facts and data, and it is antithetical to our visceral-driven way we live and interact with our world
. Our planet is facing almost insurmountable problems, problems that governments on their own clearly can’t fix.
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Why don’t we love science fiction?
Why do so many of us see science fiction as hopelessly adolescent? The truth is that we are at last living in an SF scenario,
Brain Aldiss has said, implying that makes SF redundant. Isn’t this – at the heart of our anxieties – just where this genre excels?
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Is Photography Dead?
A film photograph was at its core a record of something that happened in front of a camera; a digital photo, on the other hand, may contain only a trace of reality. Photographers can make photos as well as take them, and every landscape is now the most beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe. The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography’s special link to reality. And they’ll have to do it in a brand-new way
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The New Psychology of Leadership
Recent leadership literature notes that an effective leader is highly dependent on followers, and followers need to see their leader as one of them. For leadership to function well, leaders and followers must be bound by a shared identity and by the quest to to use that identify as a blueprint for action. If you control the definition of identify, you can change the world
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Google and Its Enemies
In the physical world of books, authors and ideas matter the most. But Google’s project to digitize 32 million books has different values. In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless. No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view. And a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you’re selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer. And ultimately the content is valued at nothing.
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David Byrne’s describes 6 music distribution models, each offering various levels of artistic control. What I like about this piece is how David Byrnes defines music, and that by doing so expands the idea that it is just a piece of plastic meant to be bought, sold, traded and replayed endlessly in any context.