Sarah Owen

"The society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise was founded by a physician named Julia Barnett Rice in 1906. Rice believed noise was unhealthy, and enlisted New York City’s gentry (including Mark Twain) to lobby for things like rules governing steamboat whistles, and silence pledges from children who played near hospitals."

The sound of gentrification is silence.

Dubbed “Astrology Tuesdays,” Bumble users in the U.S. can go to the new astrology channel within the conversations screen in Bumble’s Date mode. There will be weekly updates giving users content such as dating guides based on zodiac signs, advice on how to deepen relationships, what your astrological chart really means, the exploration of your big... See more

“The digital architecture of social media privileges the expression of emotions. It privileges the audiovisual over the written, the controversial over the moderate. All of this makes us more emotional.”

“Non-self-coercion” is the conceptual distillation of several converging threads of what you could call productivity criticism (if not outright backlash).

Grand narratives can be considered large-scale formation flight paths through narrative space, modeled perhaps as a Hofstede space crossed with time. When thousands to millions of people are living out versions of aligned, small stories within a larger one, some stories will represent “drafting” off other stories. Stable societies can be understood

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Social psychologists have known for decades that people are motivated to work harder when others are watching. When they are observed, people run faster, are more creative, and think harder about problems.