culture

To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body... See more

To me, what’s happening with teaching reading looks very much like what has happened with teaching writing, namely that we reduce something complex, human, and necessarily messy, to something smaller, discrete and oversimplified so it can be tested and measured, in order to provide comfort that we’re making “progress.”

We are courting a phenomenon... See more

To me, the significance of the theory is its introduction of a coherent frame by which we can better understand root causes for the complex array of global catastrophic risks and the prevailing crises that humanity currently faces. Critically, the Metacrisis theory also calls to our attention a staggering hidden premonition: our civilization... See more

It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.

Salmon don’t have a cosmic story that they talk about. They are born into the world and they instinctively know the direction in which they need to swim. It’s built into their DNA, inherent in their being. People, on the other hand, need stories that are created and expressed through culture in order for us to find our way forward.