David Pennington

Stories don’t sell, they invite and inspire.

What does it tell us about progress if the most influential technological innovation of the century is clearly destroying lives on a massive scale?

Again, the majority of Australians are sceptical about the productivity mantra. When they hear that word they see cost-cutting rather than shared benefit.

It’s not that Krishnamurti saw the mind as anything close to a computer. While a computational functionalist might argue that building a mind is as simple as building a machine, Krishnamurti believed our minds are so much more. But he worried we were selling ourselves short, letting our minds get stuck in mechanical routines like memory and... See more

Our strength should not be measured by our ability to push away our tech, but by our ability to hold and live with tech in peace.

Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text. The result, with any luck, is a fusion of writer and reader, with the potential to bear original insight.

HOW MUCH TO BUY YOU? I play an imaginary game with my students called, "How Much to Lick It?" I present them with various situations like "How much to lick the railing at DIA?" or "The floor of the bathroom at Crimson and Gold?" or "A bathroom floor at the Mumbai airport?" They give me various price points. The Mumbai airport usually comes in... See more

Overall, the researchers found that both deep and shallow conversations felt less awkward and led to greater feelings of connectedness and enjoyment than the participants had expected. That effect tended to be stronger for deep conversations. Participants who discussed the deep questions overestimated how awkward the conversation would be... See more