EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY Can Gluttony Set You Free? On the question of excess—of too much food, drink, or anything else—poet William Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.” This bit of wisdom from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell gets at how tricky it can be to measure how much is too much, to know […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY POLITICS SOCIOLOGY Rethinking Education The Industrial model of education that fueled the modern era and its dizzying reach did its job incredibly well. Its prime accomplishment was the expansion of our ability to abstract the world. Until then, pragmatism reigned, limiting most people’s thoughts and interactions primarily because we lacked the tools to extrapolate information, to wield it for things that lay beyond obvious […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY POLITICS SOCIOLOGY The Meat Paradox Most people eat meat and dairy with little thought of the consequences. Yet those consequences are planetary in scale. Raising livestock for meat, eggs and milk accounts for roughly 14% of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Beef production is the biggest driver of forest loss within agriculture. The meat industry has been linked to a host of other environmental […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY PSYCHOLOGY & WELLNESS SOCIOLOGY How Anna Delvey & The Tinder Swindler Exploit A Core Feature Of Human Nature Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding. That’s how Anna Sorokin’s marks explained away the supposed German heiress’s strange requests to sleep on their couch for the night, or to put plane tickets on their credit cards, which she would then forget to pay back. […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY Confucius: His Ideas & Their Relevance The man widely known in the English language as Confucius was born around 551 BCE in today’s southern Shandong Province. Confucius is the phonic translation of the Chinese word Kong fuzi孔夫子, in which Kong 孔 was his surname and fuzi is an honorific for learned men. Widely credited for creating the system of thought we now call Confucianism, this learned […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY SCIENCE SOCIOLOGY The End Of Evolution It was bound to happen. As humans, we are just too smart, too industrious, too impatient and too egotistical to leave our fate to Nature alone. Since we began uncovering Nature’s secrets at least 60,000 years ago, we have attempted to use them to control our own health. Yarrow. Opium. Horsetail. Ragwort. Hollyhock. These and the myriad […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY SOCIOLOGY Understanding Origin Stories Not a day goes by that I don’t ask myself how we got here. How we inherited a world of limitless, self-perpetuating bounty so big and complex that we still barely understand it; and yet, somehow, we have managed to mortally squander our inheritance, nonetheless. Medical intervention provides us with an apt corollary. Today, ‘healthcare’ takes one of […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY TECHNOLOGY How To Be A God: Implications Of Virtual Worlds Most research into the ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerns its use for weaponry, transport or profiling. Although the dangers presented by an autonomous, racist tank cannot be understated, there is another aspect to all this. What about our responsibilities to the AIs we create? Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (such as World of Warcraft) are pocket realities populated chiefly by […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
ART & DESIGN CULTURE EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY Life Lessons From Moby Dick As an environmental historian and scholar of the 19th century, I spend a lot of time thinking about how the past can help us confront our current crises – especially climate change. And there’s a lot of help to be found in the 1800s, from the appreciation of wildness in Henry David Thoreau’s famous “Walden,” to the rise of ecology, […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY The Algorithm That Recently Changed The World Earlier this year, an algorithm was released online — full and completely free — for academics to use. This algorithm represents one of the most important scientific discoveries of our lifetimes, showcasing the growing potential for AI to alter the course of our civilization. Using deep learning and neural networks the algorithm known as Alpha […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
What Makes People Willing To Risk Their Lives To Save Others? After an 18-year-old shooter murdered 19 elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, distraught parents directed their rage at the multiple police officers who failed to enter the classroom where children were being shot. A teacher who survived his wounds derided the officers as “cowards.” It’s possible that a broken chain of command was more consequential than […] Written by Franck McAndrew July 29, 2022July 29, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
A Company In The Clouds The influential US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, commonly known as a16z, which is based in Menlo Park, California, has just announced in a post on its corporate blog written by one of its founders, Ben Horowitz, that it is “moving to the cloud”. Big deal, you might say, thousands of companies “are in the cloud”, in the sense […] Written by Enrique Dans July 28, 2022July 28, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
A Company In The Clouds The influential US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, commonly known as a16z, which is based in Menlo Park, California, has just announced in a post on its corporate blog written by one of its founders, Ben Horowitz, that it is “moving to the cloud”. Big deal, you might say, thousands of companies “are in the cloud”, in the sense […] Written by Enrique Dans July 28, 2022July 28, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
What You Need To Know About “Stagflation” “Stagflation” is an ugly word for an ugly situation – the unpleasant combination of economic stagnation and inflation. The last time the world experienced it was the early 1970s, when oil-exporting countries in the Middle East cut supplies to the United States and other supporters of Israel. The “supply shock” of a four-fold increase in […] Written by John Hawkins July 25, 2022July 25, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
The Unseen Universe Has Finally Arrived In an unveiling that involved the president himself, the James Webb Space Telescope’s very first color image — Webb’s First Deep Field — was released yesterday evening at the White House. This image showed a paltry, grain-sized portion of the universe, albeit the picture was a beautifully sharp-resolution look at the faintest objects ever observed […] Written by Ella Alderson July 21, 2022July 21, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Rethinking Education The Industrial model of education that fueled the modern era and its dizzying reach did its job incredibly well. Its prime accomplishment was the expansion of our ability to abstract the world. Until then, pragmatism reigned, limiting most people’s thoughts and interactions primarily because we lacked the tools to extrapolate information, to wield it for things that lay beyond obvious […] Written by Anthony Fieldman March 2, 2022March 2, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
How China Is Transforming Its Economy Through Learning I highly recommend reading the McKinsey Global Institute’s new report, “Reskilling China: Transforming The World’s Largest Workforce Into Lifelong Learners”, which focuses on the country’s biggest employment challenge, re-training its workforce and the adoption of practices such as lifelong learning to address the growing digital transformation of its productive fabric. How to transform the country […] Written by Enrique Dans February 1, 2021February 1, 2021 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Why You’re Not Seeing Success With Influencer Marketing With the new year around the corner, now is a good time to re-evaluate your past marketing strategies and gear up for the year ahead. For some businesses, influencer marketing has simply not seemed to live up to its lofty promises of genuine engagement, credibility, and transparency. Some have claimed that it has been failing […] Written by Michael Tan January 14, 2021January 15, 2021 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
A New Philosophy of Business I’m about to ask you to take a mental leap. For the next 8 minutes, suspend your notions of what a business is, and I’ll propose a new lens for you to look through. There are a lot of questions asked around what “community” means for business. “Where should community fit in my organization?” and […] Written by Empirics Asia September 5, 2018September 5, 2018 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
