thoughts

In a separate example, each participants get 20 tokens and secretly chooses how many to put into a common pot. Tokens in the pots are multiplied and split evenly among 4 group members. After seeing everyone’s contributions, each player can spend 1 token to deduct 3 tokens from any teammate (“punishment” option).

Research around the world shows that,... See more

In the last decade or so, a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous—narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.

In the old Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, by far the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration, or rather demonic violence. Fold-down beds, ironing boards, waves at the beach, trailers (especially when Goofy is at the wheel of the towing vehicle, on... See more

“Those early cartoons,” Crawford writes, “present a rich phenomenology of what it is like to be an embodied agent in a world of artifacts and inexorable physical laws.” Then there’stoday’s Mickey Mouse Clubhouse:

And I think that one of the reasons that with more means, we seem to find less meaning, is that means give you permission to pay less attention .

The great run, where one exults in the strength of one's body, in the ease and the length of the stride, where nature speaks powerfully in the hills, the wind, the heat, where one takes endurance to the breaking point, and where one is finally engulfed by the good will of the spectators and the fellow runners.

Take running. In Simulation and Simulacra , Baudrillard decries it as a Disneyland-like simulacra: “They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc.” Borgmann, on the other hand, includes running as an example of a focal practice: a sustained and engaging human activity that orients life by fostering competence, excellence, and a way of life that she... See more

If this crash-like process is inevitable, recovery is not. If you happen to become aware of a parrot in time, like the piece of corn noticed by the author of the depression story, you can regain the ability to keep playing.

But if you crash into a finite game and fail to see a parrot for long enough, you can lose the will to keep playing entirely. W... See more