What is this CAT Reading List?
This CAT Reading list is created by me, as a result of spending several thousand hours in reading thousands of articles and picking articles that can help a CAT Aspirant in VARC Preparation for CAT, and has about 1000+ articles in this collection. Most of the articles in this list are going to be much longer than your passage that appears in CAT. It is done intentionally to help one retain the understanding from reading an article and not facts. It is a collection of all articles I have shared across since 2018 on a daily basis. This will also get updated as and when I post new articles. We are also planning to have a weekly list of articles.
How to Make use of CAT Reading List?
Bookmark this CAT Reading List page. (press ctrl + D if on a PC, or press the star on the right of the url bar, if on chrome either on mobile or pc). Keep coming back to it on a daily basis. Reading everyday helps tremendously in your CAT Preparation in two ways to start with:
1. Your VARC Prep takes care of itself.
2. You get more time to spend on Quantitative Aptitude and DI LR Sections.
This page provides you with meticulously curated articles to improve your English Comprehension, especially if you are preparing for Management entrance exams such as CAT, XAT, IIFT etc.
Find articles classified broadly under 6 different major categories. Click on the Category button to view collection of hand picked articles under that category. You can also scroll down to find recent articles from each category listed under tabs.
Reading List – This Week
Reading List | This Week | March 3rd week 2023
Reading list from 3rd week of March! In case you have missed any of the articles from last week, check out this post! Read on to Nail CAT VARC!
Categories listed are:
- Technology, Industry and Science (part 1 50+ articles | part 2 60+ articles)
- Psychology and Philosophy (part 1 48 articles | part 2 40+ articles)
- Humans and Culture (part 1 60+ articles| part 2 60+ articles)
- Politics, Law and Crime (part 1 50+ articles| part 2 20+ articles )
- Economy and Business (part 1 20+ articles)
- Fiction and Others (part 1 8 articles)
- Technology Industry Science
- Psychology & Philosophy
- Humans Culture
- Politics Law Crime
- Economy Business
- Fiction Others
Curated Reading list for CAT -Technology/Industry/Science | 2
This post contains loads of articles categorised under Technology, Industry and Science. These are handpicked articles over the course of years for CAT Aspirants. This is the last of 2 posts. Click on the following link to go to the previous post: LINK here.
Every Article will have blurb, either written by me or an extract from the original post (mostly the latter) followed by the link to reach the article.
Article 193
A Mars simulation in an active mine is aiding the quest to uncover life in the distant cosmos.
Article 192
The dance of the naked emperors
Article 191
Glimpses of humanity in an unlikely corner of the internet
Article 190
Effing the Ineffable: A Writer Takes Psilocybin
Article 190
1,200 Scientists and Professionals Declare: “There is No Climate Emergency”
Article 189
For decades, the country’s tech triumphs have disguised its seized-up digital systems.
Article 188
Fossils of Australopithecus in a South African cave are one million years older than previously thought. This challenges the consensus that humans first evolved in East Africa
Article 187
Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
Article 186
The fusion record was achieved at the National Ignition Facility at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which ignites fusion fuel with an array of 192 lasers
Article 185
Some companies offer tests that rank embryos based on their risk of developing complex diseases such as schizophrenia or heart disease. Are they accurate — or ethical?
Article 184
Research labs are pursuing technology to “reprogram” aging bodies back to youth.
Article 183
Intensive irrigation and climate change are depleting groundwater reserves in this fast-developing nation.
Article 182
Welcome to hell, Elon : You break it, you buy it.
Article 181
Does CBD help with Insomnia?
https://nyti.ms/3PYVjDM
Article 180
Consuming alcohol can mess with your emotions the next day by causing stress hormones to spike and sleep to be disrupted overnight.
Article 179
One of the most useful and interesting things I learned in the last year was not so much a specific subject or skill but a meta-skill. I learned how to learn.
Article 178
An effective wealth transfer of $2.8 billion from labor to capital in just three months.
Article 178
The high price we pay for social media. This might resonate (or not) with the Millennial/Gen-Z folks! 🙂
Article 177
New data show the climate costs of the eating habits of different countries
Article 176
Facebook’s founder is setting a relentless pace as he pushes his company through a tech transformation during a global economic slowdown.
Article 175
Questions over how to feed China’s hog herd remain a growing challenge for Beijing and a threat to global food security.
Article 174
Big firms and wealthy individuals are just as prone to making bad decisions as anyone else
Article 173
A glimpse into the e-commerce giant’s ruthless efficiency.
Article 172
A new CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function using a tool called Perturb-seq. The work was led by Jonathan Weissman and colleagues at MIT and the Whitehead Institute and is free for other scientists to use.
Article 171
A bacterium found on a remote Pacific island first became the obsession of a Punjabi microbiologist. It then became a wonder drug that gave hope to millions around the world
Article 170
Oh… are we still talking about this?
Article 169
Go and replace “watch” in any YouTube video URL with “wtch” and see what happens. I set out to find why.
Article 168
The Twitter founder, Block CEO, and Elon Musk buddy is gazing into the future with laser eyes, and he wants you to follow him.
Article 167
The fact that the dead can literally replace living faculty members is a perfect metaphor for what is happening across higher education.
Article 166
Last fortnight, Indian upstart Hasura enabled GraphQL hot on the heels of becoming India’s newest DevOps unicorn
Article 165
An unprecedented heatwave is turning cities into death traps for outdoor workers
Article 164
The old good email remains the most critical digital communication tool. What makes the venerable email so useful and sustainable over the long time is its openness and standardization.
Article 163
Medical professionals are embracing the technology to help patients deal with PTSD, anxiety disorders and more
Article 162
How cellphones transformed life in a women’s prison in Argentina
A temporary measure at the start of the pandemic has become permanent in Argentina, making life easier for both inmates and guards.
Article 161
Ever Had a Really Long Acid Trip? Now Science Knows Why
A new paper finally reveals the secret of the LSD Trip Gone Far Too Long: The drug binds to receptors in your brain in a fascinating way.
Article 160
“My Ancestral Home, The Mall
Lil Miquela’s Post-Racial Society”
Article 159
“The Automation Myth
Robots won’t build the classless society”
Article 158
“Massive Black Holes Shown to Act Like Quantum Particles
Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave.”
Article 157
“Requiem for a War Robot
An anthropologist explores the brave new world of virtual warfare—and the fraught relationship between humans and machines.”
Article 156
“Microplastics found in human blood for first time
Exclusive: The discovery shows the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs”
Article 155
“It’s Like GPT-3 but for Code—Fun, Fast, and Full of Flaws
OpenAI’s new tool can autocomplete lines of programming or conjure software from a simple prompt. It could also riddle the internet with even more bugs.”
Article 154
“I Interviewed AI GPT-3 Davinci-002, and This is What it Said.
The Interview Between A.I. and Myself.”
Article 153
“Love Is Biological Bribery
Evolution uses all its tricks to make sure we procreate. But love in humans is a many-splendored thing.”
Article 152
When You’ve Been THIS Stupid, You’ll Never Want To Be Sensible Again.
Article 151
“NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS HAVE SPRUNG ONTO OUR FEEDS RECENTLY, CLAIMING TO BE THE NEXT BIG THING. BUT IS THIS AN ONLINE POPULIST UPRISING OR JUST AN ENVIRONMENTALLY DESTRUCTIVE FAD?”
Article 150
“Bill Gates Invests in Carbon Capture Startup After Tech Breakthrough”
Article 149
“In an ever-changing landscape, the company needs to move quickly and so if they’re constantly trying to negotiate with third parties or waiting to produce the next blockbuster.”
Article 148
“We mined roughly 13 bitcoins and then ripped up our private key. We were stupid—but not alone.”
Article 147
“Thwaites Glacier is crumbling, and fast—if it melts entirely, it could add 10 feet to sea levels. Now Antarctic scientists are racing to survey the damage.”
https://bit.ly/3qgf5Rj
Article 146
“The word game has gone from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few months. It was created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner.”
https://nyti.ms/3HPFOtX
Article 145
“Bonus-led traps, penalty-driven drives,endless working hours, accidents and anxiety”
Article 144
“Everyone from tech companies to churches wants a say in how the EU regulates AI that could harm people.” https://bit.ly/3FsXaMi
Article 143
“In light of Epic’s vision, the Meta concept is an underwhelming replica”
https://bit.ly/3kgskOy
Article 142
“From India to Ethiopia, Rest of World breaks down how Facebook’s neglect put millions at risk around the world.”
https://bit.ly/2ZLWPVf
Article 141
“What’s bigger? A quarter of a pound? Or a third?”
https://bit.ly/3nfSNN6
Article 140
“This is the rare coding language comparison where there’s an obvious answer, no matter what the context.”
https://bit.ly/307bdYg
Article 139
“One of the great mysteries facing humanity is the question of how we sense our environment. The mechanisms underlying our senses have triggered our curiosity for thousands of years, for example, how light is detected by the eyes, how sound waves affect our inner ears, and how different chemical compounds interact with receptors in our nose and mouth generating smell and taste.”
https://bit.ly/3BcNNOS
Article 138
“The most resilient parasite Christopher Nolan’s Inception and viral ideas”
https://bit.ly/3F6ReJf
Article 137
“The Pole Reversal Process Has Begun: What Could This Mean For Our Future? The Earth’s north magnetic pole is on the move.”
https://bit.ly/3CTWjmo
Article 136
“The Notorious MSG’s Unlikely Formula For Success
The “umami” craze has turned a much-maligned and misunderstood food additive into an object of obsession for the world’s most innovative chefs. But secret ingredient monosodium glutamate’s biggest secret may be that there was never anything wrong with it at all.”
http://bzfd.it/3CfkUSl
Article 135
“The food wars
Vitamins or whole foods; high-fat or low-fat; sugar or sweetener. Will we ever get a clear idea about what we should eat?”
http://bit.ly/3kRWffy
Article 134
“Apple’s Double Agent
He spent years inside the iPhone leaks and jailbreak community. He was also spying for Apple.”
https://bit.ly/3yDKaPS
Article 133
“Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance
Workers at one of the world’s largest call center companies said additional monitoring would violate the privacy of their families in their homes.”
http://nbcnews.to/2W3hH8R
Article 132
“The Jessica Simulation:
Love and loss in the age of A.I.
The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?”
https://bit.ly/37kUIbC
Article 131
“Welcome To The Age Of The All-Electric Hypercar
Boasting up to 2,000bhp with no fuel cap, a trio of new releases from Lotus, Pininfarina and Rimac are here for when your Ferrari just isn’t fast enough”
https://bit.ly/3hHHNFf
Article 130
“World wide open
Deep brain stimulation not only treats psychiatric disease – it changes the whole person, boosting confidence and openness”
https://bit.ly/3xkTZSV
Article 129
“Same or Different? The Question Flummoxes Neural Networks.
For all their triumphs, AI systems can’t seem to generalize the concepts of “same” and “different.” Without that, researchers worry, the quest to create truly intelligent machines may be hopeless. “
https://bit.ly/36ci7Lx
Article 128
“Are you ready for cyborg workers?
Augmented colleagues are coming – but how will HR cope?”
https://bit.ly/3w6EDzX
“This Twist on Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox Has Major Implications for Quantum Theory
A laboratory demonstration of the classic “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment could overturn cherished assumptions about reality”
https://bit.ly/35K2xGL
Article 127
“The $149 Smartphone That Could Bring The Linux Mobile Ecosystem to Life
The low-cost PinePhone isn’t a perfect device, but the nuanced ecosystem it’s going to build for Linux-based smartphones is going to be amazing.”
Article 126
“Inside Pirelli’s Massive Formula One Tire Operation
When trawling through a Formula One paddock very briefly for the first time back in 2015, my first thought (after I got over the glamour of it all) was, my God there are a lot of tires here”
http://bit.ly/3ctY0we
Article 125
Super interesting and super detailed article that decodes the possible beginning of SARS-cov19
“Origin of Covid – Following the Clues
Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?”
https://bit.ly/3yXLtL1
Article 124
“The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy
How the shape of deep learning—and the fate of the tech industry—went up for sale in Harrah’s Room 731, on the shores of Lake Tahoe.”
https://bit.ly/2RdNKR4
Article 123
“The Cure
When it comes to life-saving, even India’s jingoists take modern medicine for granted. This is how that happened.”
https://bit.ly/3u9cLue
Article 122
“The Largest Cells on Earth
Deep in the ocean abyss, xenophyophores are worlds unto themselves.”
https://bit.ly/2T7f0l1
Article 121
“Android Becomes Basically Unusable If You Turn Off All of Google’s Tracking
I know, because I tried”
https://bit.ly/3ep9OkB
Article 120
“A Nude ‘Playboy’ Photo Has Been a Mainstay in Testing Tech for Decades
The documentary ‘Losing Lena’ is about the many small ways in which women are told they don’t belong in tech”
http://bit.ly/3xsHJAm
Article 119
“A 23-Year-Old Coder Kept QAnon Online When No One Else Would
Nick Lim provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon.”
http://bloom.bg/3draqWy
Article 118
“People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why
“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.””
http://bit.ly/3ga1mXK
Article 117
Super Long & Intersting Read! Must read
“Secrets of the Little Blue Box
“You see, a few years ago the phone company made one big mistake,” Gilbertson explains two days later in his apartment. “They were careless enough to let some technical journal publish the actual frequencies used to create all their multi-frequency tones. Just a theoretical article some Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer was doing about switching theory, and he listed the tones in passing.”
https://bit.ly/3uQZ0kL
Article 116
“The Rise of Junk Science
Fake publications are corrupting the world of research—and influencing real news”
http://bit.ly/2Pa9rQU
Article 115
“The race to build the world’s first sex robot
The $30bn sex tech industry is about to unveil its biggest blockbuster: a $15,000 robot companion that talks, learns, and never says no”
http://bit.ly/3rBPYXv
Article 114
“Gravitational Waves Probe Exotic Matter inside Neutron Stars
A new analysis of light and gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars helps reveal what’s inside these ultradense objects”
http://bit.ly/300M7qP
Article 113
“The Dawn of CRISPR Mutants
An anthropologist dives into the world of genetic engineering to explore whether gene-editing tools such as CRISPR fulfill the hope of redesigning our species for the better.”
http://bit.ly/3klBf03
Article 112
“What Pornhub and Peloton Have in Common With FacebookAn online speech expert explains why no online platform will be spared from content-moderation controversy”
http://bit.ly/37uDadt
Article 111
“TikTok and the Sorting Hat
The 2010’s were a fascinating time to follow the consumer tech industry in China. Though I left Hulu in 2011, I still kept in touch with a lot of the team from our satellite Hulu Beijing office, many of whom scattered out to various Chinese tech companies throughout the past decade. On my last visit to the Hulu Beijing office in 2011, I was skeptical any of the new tech companies out of China would ever crack the U.S. market.”
http://bit.ly/2YzjGzA
Article 110
“Asian rivers are turning black. And our colorful closets are to blame Textile dyeing is one of the most polluting aspects of the global fashion industry, devastating the environment and posing health hazards to humans.”
http://cnn.it/371c0uj
Article 109
“Everything You Should Know About Sound
We think of sound as something we hear—something that makes noise. But in pure physics terms, sound is just a vibration going through matter.”
http://bit.ly/3aQiopl
Article 108
“The Mystery Of India’s Plummeting COVID-19 Cases”
http://n.pr/39CbTqV
Article 107
“A Movie of the Evolving Universe Is Potentially Scary
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will reveal all sorts of short-term changes in the cosmos—and some could have dire consequences for humanity”
http://bit.ly/38XlPuS
Article 106
“The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End
In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago.”
https://bit.ly/2MNwCiD
Article 105
“Back-up brains: The era of digital immortality
These largely un-interrogated questions also begin to touch on more fundamental issues of what it means to be human. Would an emulated brain be considered human and, if so, does the humanity exist in the memories or the hardware on which the simulated brain runs? “
http://bbc.in/2KPKJU7
Article 104
One last article for 2020 is here!
“The rise and fall of Flash, the annoying plugin that shaped the modern web
Before 1996, the web was a static, dull place. But the accidental creation of Flash turned it into a cacophony of noise, colour, and controversy, presaging the modern web”
http://bit.ly/2MiZ1Nb
Article 103
“A Twisted Path to Equation-Free Prediction.
Complex natural systems defy standard mathematical analysis, so one ecologist is throwing out the equations.”
https://bit.ly/372ZTgY
Article 102
“The extra materials and energy involved in manufacturing a lithium-ion battery mean that, at present, the carbon emissions associated with producing an electric car are higher than those for a vehicle running on petrol or diesel – by as much as 38%, according to some calculations. Until the electricity in national grids is entirely renewable, recharging the battery will involve a degree of dependence on coal or gas-fired power stations.”
http://bit.ly/37t0EA7
Article 101
“Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record
After 44 years, there’s finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem.”
https://bit.ly/2UzXa7B
Article 100
“Hopefully, this attention to them can also bring about a sense of humility, which will surely benefit a species brought to its knees not by alien invaders, but by a coronavirus spread through microscopic droplets.”
https://bit.ly/34SPyTG
Article 99
“How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices
Social media platforms repeatedly use so-called dark patterns to nudge you toward giving away more of your data.”
https://bit.ly/3dOuy39
Article 98
“Cryptography Pioneer Seeks Secure Elections the Low-Tech Way
Ronald Rivest helped come up with the RSA algorithm, which safeguards online commerce. Now he’s hoping to make democratic elections more trustworthy.”
https://bit.ly/3d0UHeW
Article 97
“Can the Internet Survive Climate Change?
How a warming world is sparking calls for a greener web”
https://bit.ly/3dcBOWr
Article 96
“The Big and the Small”
https://bit.ly/2Se1rfV
Article 95
“Mitochondria May Hold Keys to Anxiety and Mental Health
Research hints that the energy-generating organelles of cells may play a surprisingly pivotal role in mediating anxiety and depression.”
https://bit.ly/36fyVm6
Article 94
“For Math Fans: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Number 42
Here is how a perfectly ordinary number captured the interest of sci-fi enthusiasts, geeks and mathematicians”
https://bit.ly/331QqUV
Article 93
“Coffee Rust Is Going to Ruin Your Morning
Coffee plants were supposed to be safe on this side of the Atlantic. But the fungus found them.”
https://bit.ly/364Ia8E
Article 92
“Pharma Companies Argue That Lower Drug Prices Would Mean Fewer Breakthrough Drugs. Is That True?”
https://bit.ly/33U2ruS
Article 91
“‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions”
https://bit.ly/33VhDbt
Article 90
“Why Guerrilla Games stubbornly built its amazing game engine from scratch
Meet Decima, the engine that birthed several of your beloved games”
https://bit.ly/35JoO9a
Article 89
In continuation from yesterday’s article, we go one step back and look at how GPT-2 worked.
“How this A.I became a communist
This A.I was able to change his understanding of life after reading communist books.”
https://bit.ly/3izG8Rk
Article 88
“A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?
GPT-3
We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace”
https://bit.ly/3kfWLSx
Article 87
“Catastrophes and calms Evolution is extraordinarily creative in the wake of a cataclysm. How does life keep steadily ticking over in between?”
https://bit.ly/3ivR6Yl
Article 86
“How a Tiny Bacterium Called Wolbachia Could Defeat Dengue Scientists are immunizing mosquitoes against disease with the help of a common microbe”
https://bit.ly/3heZWrZ
Article 85
“The Life-Saving Car Technology No One Wants Safety features that would make vehicles far less lethal to pedestrians exist right now. Why aren’t they required?”
https://bloom.bg/33cnZm2
Article 84
“Extra DNA May Make Unlikely Hybrid Fish Possible The unintentional creation of “sturddlefish” hybrids may illuminate the genomic mechanisms that govern whether species can interbreed.”
https://bit.ly/3lX5GtO
Article 83
“Mathematicians Will Never Stop Proving the Prime Number Theorem
Why do mathematicians enjoy proving the same results in different ways?”
https://bit.ly/32GeBHr
Article 82
“My Pacemaker Is Tracking Me From Inside My Body
Cloud-connected medical devices save lives, but also raise questions about privacy, security, and oversight. An Object Lesson.”
https://bit.ly/2EyGpFf
Article 81
“Android Phones Might Be More Secure Than iPhones Now
What the market for zero-day exploits tells us about our phones”
https://bit.ly/2YtTlTK
Article 80
“The Brave New World of Chemical Romance
How love drugs will shape the future of our relationships.”
https://bit.ly/3gPU34U
Article 79
“How to safely reopen offices, schools and other public spaces while keeping people six feet apart comes down to a question mathematicians have been studying for centuries.”
https://bit.ly/3iqA3WR
Article 78
“You Can’t Kill the Bloomberg Terminal. But If You Were Going to Try, Here’s How. Bloomberg is one of the best software companies in history, so good luck and best wishes”
https://bit.ly/33BEERQ
Article 77
Brilliant experiential writing on Youtube algorithm form a Individual POV.
“See Zeynep Tufekci, in the New York Times: “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” And Kevin Roose’s extraordinary front-page Times article “The Making of a YouTube Radical.””
https://bit.ly/2D0rRgI
Article 76
“What Happened When I Switched From Mac to Windows
Fed up with the rising cost and declining quality of Apple laptops, I migrated to Microsoft. It has been both a total joy and a complete pain in the neck.”
https://bit.ly/2CWbjqj
Article 75
“How a Defense of Christianity Revolutionized Brain Science”
https://bit.ly/3fBSWFx
Article 74
The Walkman, Forty Years On
The gadget that taught the world to socially distance.”
https://bit.ly/2DwzxYo
Article 73
“The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
Hospitals and pharmacies are required to toss expired drugs, no matter how expensive or vital. Meanwhile the FDA has long known that many remain safe and potent for years longer.”
https://bit.ly/38Fjz9G
Article 72
“What’s wrong with WhatsApp
As social media has become more inhospitable, the appeal of private online groups has grown. But they hold their own dangers – to those both inside and out.”
https://bit.ly/2O0fpzX
Article 71
Brilliant longform article!
“Move Mirror: An AI Experiment with Pose Estimation in the Browser using TensorFlow.js
Pose estimation, or the ability to detect humans and their poses from image data, is one of the most exciting — and most difficult — topics in machine learning and computer vision. Recently, Google shared PoseNet: a state-of-the-art pose estimation model that provides highly accurate pose data from image data. This is the story of the experiment that prompted us to create this pose estimation library for the web in the first place.” https://bit.ly/2AgO0X4
Article 70
“The rating game: how Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses.
Soon, you’ll be able to go to the Olive Garden and order your fettuccine alfredo from a tablet mounted to the table. After paying, you’ll rate the server. Then you can use that tablet to hail an…”
https://bit.ly/31ioY54
Article 69
“Apple Just Crippled IDFA, Sending An $80 Billion Industry Into Upheaval”
https://bit.ly/383LEan
Article 68
“A Deadly Mosquito-Borne Illness Is Brewing in the Northeast
EEE kills almost half of its victims, and cases are on the rise”
https://bit.ly/2MOPWc6
Article 67
“Each night I lay in my bed beside my boyfriend with one eye closed against the pillow and with the other, wheeled down Instagram’s infinite scroll. Each morning, I woke up to my phone alarm and rolled over to tap it off and, if I had time, looked at Instagram while still half-asleep. I easily spent an hour on it a day – in bed, on the subway or at my desk during lunch. Compared with the hours I spent elsewhere on the internet, it felt like nothing.”
https://bit.ly/2Ag5IcV
Article 66
“How Time Is Encoded in Memories
Rats and equations help researchers develop a theory of how our brains keep track of when events took place.”
https://bit.ly/36uRGAe
Article 65
“In March 2017, Loeb caused a media frenzy by suggesting that FRBs could actually be of alien origin – solar-powered radio transmitters that might be interstellar light sails pushing huge spaceships across galaxies.”
https://bit.ly/2xozHhF
Article 66
“In his first year at university, Li was extremely shy. He came up with a personal algorithm for making friends in the canteen, weighing data on group size and conversation topic to optimise the chances of a positive encounter. The method helped him to make friends, so he developed others: how to master English, how to interpret dreams, how to find a girlfriend. While other students spent the long nights studying, Li started to think about how he could apply his algorithmic approach to business. When he graduated at the turn of the millennium, he decided that he would make his fortune in the field he knew best: education.”
https://bit.ly/3f2xOIJ
Article 64
“Two weeks back, Zoho Corporation sued Freshworks for copying its trade secrets. I wrote a report on comparing the two businesses during my MBA as part of a course requirement. In the wake of recent developments, I believe it will be an interesting read: attaching below, a version of the essay.”
https://bit.ly/3bcNIxA
Article 63
“As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.”
https://bit.ly/2UAm0F9
Article 62
“What if I open a program (an Internet-browsing “app,” say), swipe it away, and then open it again? If that program is already running, the system will bring that program to the front again—but shouldn’t I know whether it’s maximizing an already-opened program, or starting it anew? And what if I want to open a second instance of that program instead? These operating systems treat us like we’re children, and I don’t appreciate it.”
https://bit.ly/2xkFK6y
Article 63
“So why is the fatality rate close to 4%?
If 5% of your cases require intensive care and you can’t provide it, most of those people die. As simple as that.”
https://bit.ly/2WEJLx9
Article 61
“If you’re wondering whether it’s an overreaction to cancel large gatherings and public events (and I love basketball), here’s a useful primer as to why these measures can slow the spread of the virus and save lives. We have to look out for each other. – Barack Obama”
“Hospitals filled with Covid-19 patients won’t just strain to care for those patients — doctors may also have to prioritize them over others. “Right now there’s always a doctor available when you need one, but that may not be the case if we’re not careful,” Landon said.”
http://bit.ly/3b2L8Kn
Article 60
“Today, China uses almost half the world’s concrete. The property sector – roads, bridges, railways, urban development and other cement-and-steel projects – accounted for a third of its economy’s expansion in 2017. Every major city has a floor-sized scale model of urban development plans that has to be constantly updated as small white plastic models are turned into mega-malls, housing complexes and concrete towers.”
http://bit.ly/2VvFBYa
Article 59
““Cancer,” Bryson reports, “is above all an age thing. Between birth and the age of forty, men have a just one in seventy-one chance of getting cancer and women one in fifty-one, but over sixty the odds [rise] to one in three for men and one in four for women.” With cancer come the complications of radiation and the nightmare of chemotherapy. At what age does one decide to forego treatment and give up the ghost? A gastroenterologist I used to see on occasion showed me a letter one day from a patient, a man of seventy-one, who had decided to forgo any efforts to stave off his recently discovered stomach cancer, preferring death to treatment. He had, he wrote in the letter, “had enough of life.””
http://bit.ly/2PBAEZO
Article 58
“Brain decoding took off about a decade ago1, when neuroscientists realized that there was a lot of untapped information in the brain scans they were producing using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). That technique measures brain activity by identifying areas that are being fed oxygenated blood, which light up as coloured blobs in the scans. To analyse activity patterns, the brain is segmented into little boxes called voxels — the three-dimensional equivalent of pixels — and researchers typically look to see which voxels respond most strongly to a stimulus, such as seeing a face. By discarding data from the voxels that respond weakly, they conclude which areas are processing faces.”
https://go.nature.com/2SYUe4n
Article 57
“Winston discovered he had millions of Chinese fans who had never even been on YouTube. He was constantly approached by Chinese fans explaining that they saw his videos on Chinese streaming sites. “This is how China works,” says Winston, “they take your property and make it their own.” Even fewer Westerners are on Chinese social media than Chinese are on Western social media so there is little chance of thieves ever being discovered and, while intellectual property and creative content theft is common in China, the theft is always going towards China, not away.”
http://bit.ly/3bCmJvU
Article 56
“How does it know? There are no dials and settings on the Pot. As far as you can tell, there is only a heating element beneath. There doesn’t look like room for anything else to hide. How does the Pot know how long to cook the rice? It is a mystery of the Orient. Don’t ask questions you don’t need the answers to. The point here is to save you some time and money. If you want gourmet cooking, you aren’t going to learn about it here.”
http://bit.ly/2UGptm8
Article 55
“His only hope of seeing his father resurrected is to live to see the Singularity — the moment when computing power reaches an “intelligence explosion.” At this point, according to transhumanists such as Kurzweil, people who are merged with this technology will undergo a radical transformation. They will become posthuman: immortal, limitless, changed beyond recognition. Kurzweil predicts this will happen by the year 2045. Unlike his father, he, along with those of us who are lucky enough to survive into the middle of this century, will achieve immortality without ever tasting death.”
http://bit.ly/2vQviTz
Article 54
“Amazon “generates meager profits,” electing to keep prices low while “choosing to expand at a speed and scale that is pushing it into the red,” she writes. It has risen to become the world’s second most valuable firm, worth about $1 trillion, because it is “at the center of e-commerce” and owns “essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it.””
http://bit.ly/39ZfRIq
Article 53
“It doesn’t matter that its shatterproof windows aren’t very shatterproof at all, or that, based on its design, the Cybertruck sucks at being an actual truck. Seemingly, the Cybertruck is a physical manifestation of Musk’s hubris: He’s built a fandom of nerds so vast and so wealthy, he believes he can sell them a $40,000 truck that looks like an extra from the video game Twisted Metal.”
http://bit.ly/34P2JBW
Article 52
“The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies will not divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the identities of clients. The secrecy is deemed essential for protecting the reputations of beloved brands. The fast-food chains, understandably, would like the public to believe that the flavors of the food they sell somehow originate in their restaurant kitchens, not in distant factories run by other firms. A McDonald’s french fry is one of countless foods whose flavor is just a component in a complex manufacturing process. The look and the taste of what we eat now are frequently deceiving — by design.”
http://bit.ly/2EKcQwY
Article 51
“A popular trope about Silicon Valley involves its skill of regurgitation. Its companies vie to replace public services or brick-and-mortar businesses, after deeming these business models inefficient. Then they dress up those same models and spit them back out as their own revenue plans. In 2017, Lyft rolled out Shuttle, where commuters wait at designated locations to share rides: a bus service. MakeSpace raised millions of dollars for its product: “Cloud storage for physical stuff” – or storage lockers. Apple’s human curators of news are editors. WeLive’s co-living spaces are hostels and dorms. Uber Health is the ambulance.”
http://bit.ly/2RBOwVT
Article 50
“The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, founded in 2007, took a two-pronged approach, pairing novice speakers with older speakers who were fluent in the Chickasaw language, and using technology to reach a wider audience. Language learners were paired with expert speakers in a master/apprentice program for immersive lessons that lasted several hours a day, five days a week. Hinson credits his ability to learn so much of the language in just a few years to this type of approach and to his own dogged determination. Under Hinson’s direction, the tribe also built an online television network with six different channels that include language lessons, cultural events, and oral histories.”
http://bit.ly/341ZhDj
Article 49
“Ian Malcolm’s web page stayed up for several months. Stu-Bot would periodically replace the old paper titles with sometimes plausible (and often hilarious) new ones. I don’t know how many people came across this site and actually believed it was real. When the higher-ups at SFI finally got wind of it, they declared it inappropriate and quickly shut down the site.”
http://bit.ly/2L9hfgA
Article 48
“A visit to Chatroulette usually begins with a few rushed clicks of the “Next” button, either out of a sense of danger—do you really want to engage with that empty-eyed guy lounging in bed?—or out of curiosity about what’s around the corner. The majority of Chatroulette users are male and under thirty-five, and many of them are trolling for girls, so they “next” each other at barbaric rates. When you do decide to stop and engage, things can get a little awkward. On one of my first Chatrouletting attempts, I found myself talking to a man from Lyons, who had muted the sound. We watched each other typing and reacting to the words that scrolled next to our images, co-stars in a postmodern silent film.”
http://bit.ly/2R1Q23i
Article 47
“With its cheap geothermal energy and low crime rate, Iceland has become the world’s leading miner of digital currency. Then the crypto-crooks showed up.”
http://bit.ly/2rKq3ml
Article 46
“She hadn’t had much Airbnb experience when she and her daughter decided to book a place in Marina del Rey, California, this past spring, she said. But as a criminal defense attorney, she figured she had a pretty good barometer for bullshit.Just before check-in, Patterson had gotten a call that was almost exactly the same as the one I had received. The man on the other end of the line said that the property’s bathroom wasn’t working, but that he was able to put them up in a much bigger place until a plumber could fix the problem.”
http://bit.ly/2NQI7mm
Article 45
“Thanks to his clever use of social media, he was dubbed the first prime minister of the Instagram age – but after four years in power, cracks in his image have started to show.”
http://bit.ly/2CgWGdv
Article 44
“So far, though, Silicon Valley’s response has been sluggish at best. The tech giants claim immunity under a law that likens social media companies to newsstands rather than to publishers responsible for the content on their platforms. In other words, they argue, social media companies don’t create the offensive material that ends up on their pages, so they can’t be held liable. The law is the subject of fierce debate inside DC’s Beltway and is at the heart of many battles over the publication of hate manifestos, terror screeds, sex ads, fake news, and, more recently, drugs.”
http://bit.ly/2WauDFu
Article 43
“Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sacklers, marketed the drug so heavily that they were eventually convicted of felony “misbranding.” They said it was non-addictive, abuse-proof. Purdue bought and sold doctors to over-prescribe the medicine across America, bringing in billions of dollars in profits. Rich and poor, black and white, Purdue Pharma bought lunches and dinners and weekends on yachts for the doctors who prescribed the most pills to the most humans. Reps were given bonuses for getting doctors to prescribe more pills and higher doses.”
http://bit.ly/2MBXUWP
Article 42
“Intuit also continues to use “dark patterns” — design tricks to get users of its website to do things they don’t necessarily mean to do — to ensure that as many customers as possible pay, former employees say. A marketing concept frequently invoked at Intuit, which goes by the acronym “FUD,” seeks to tap into Americans’ fear, uncertainty and doubt about the tax filing process.”
http://bit.ly/2MyW1dq
Article 41
“On the great dividing line of first- and second-world influence, anticommunist émigrés living in Western Germany provided a reliable stream of local content. Since the Soviet propaganda machine worked overtime spreading anti-American rumors and disinformation, the broadcasters working for the various U.S.-sponsored “Radio” properties in the Eastern bloc often improvised material to combat the communist threat. Journalists working for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty cherry-picked interviews with recent defectors or accepted unsubstantiated rumors as fact.”
http://bit.ly/35PFPMc
Article 40
Advice from 1982 on how and why one should buy a computer. “I can hardly bring myself to mention the true disadvantage of computers,” Fallows writes, “which is that I have become hopelessly addicted to them.”“My computer has a 48K memory. Since each K represents 1,024 bytes of information—each byte representing one character or digit—the machine can manipulate more than 49,000 items of information at a time. In practice, after allowing for the space that The Electric Pencil’s programming instructions occupy in the computer’s memory, the machine can handle documents 6,500 to 7,500 words long, or a little longer than this article. I break anything longer into chunks or chapters and work with them one at a time.”
http://bit.ly/2p7okGD
Article 39
“The MQ-1B Predator drone, or the “Pred,” as its crews call it, is flown from here. Underground and underwater fiber-optic cables link these trailers—ground-control stations, really—to Europe, where a satellite dish makes the connection directly to every Predator in the air over Baghdad, and along the Afghan-Pakistani border, and wherever else they are needed. Local airfields get them into the air, then Las Vegas takes over.”
http://bit.ly/2LOwMDi
Article 38
“TikTok-famous teens, the envy of their generation, are all too aware that their fame could go away at any moment. What goes unspoken is that there is always someone funnier or prettier or more likable or who works harder, and that soon their own face may show up less and less on strangers’ screens. That so many people will become TikTok-famous or Instagram-famous or Twitter-famous that it will cease to mean quite so much; that someday there will be simply too many influencers and not enough eyeballs and money. That if everyone is a little bit famous, no one is.”
http://bit.ly/30Jqut2
Article 37
“We are given only the noisy half of probability that its cause is located inside of ourselves and never the quiet part of probability that cancer’s source pervades our shared world. Our genes are tested: our drinking water isn’t. Our body is scanned, but not our air. We are told it is in the error of our feelings or told it is in the inevitabilities of our flesh. We are told there is a difference between illness and health, between what is acute and what is chronic, between living and dying, too.”
http://bit.ly/34XORGN
Article 36
“My belief is the distinguishing characteristic of humanity is this keystone ability to have descriptions with which we construct stories. I think stories are what make us different from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. And if story-understanding is really where it’s at, we can’t understand our intelligence until we understand that aspect of it.”
http://bit.ly/2p9JVxX
Article 35
“There’s a lot of people that will teach you how to make money. It’s just, the thing is, like, an information product in that niche, is, I mean, how tangible is that information? What is someone going to do with what you tell them. Most people won’t do anything with it. You know, 90% of the people who get that information product, really aren’t going to do anything with it. It’s no different than when our country tells people to go to college for, you know, eight years, four years, like I did and expect a job when they come out. And then there’s no job.”
http://bit.ly/2mQVUQj
Article 34
“But at some point, each of them looked up and noticed the same strange thing: the tiny light beside their webcam glowing. At first they figured it was some kind of malfunction, but when it happened repeatedly—the light flicking on, then off—the girls felt a chill. One by one, they gazed fearfully into the lenses, wondering if someone was watching and if, perhaps now, they were looking into the eye of something scary after all. Nila, for one, wasn’t taking any chances. She peeled off a sticker and stuck it on the lens.” http://bit.ly/2m4YHEH
Article 33
“Once upon a time” refers to relatively recent years (2001-2006), during which I wrote several books and published more than 50 pieces of magazine journalism and criticism – a total output of, give or take, 4,500 manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realise this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness. Obviously I was disciplined. These days I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction – excepting those I was also reviewing – in the last year. These days I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon and spend my evenings playing video games.””
http://bit.ly/2mlWZ1L
Article 32
“And this job is just about the only game in town, like it is in lots of towns, and eventually will be in more towns, with US internet retail sales projected to grow 10 percent every year to $279 billion in 2015 and with Amazon, the largest of the online retailers, seeing revenues rise 30 to 40 percent year after year and already having 69 giant warehouses, 17 of which came online in 2011 alone. So butch up, Sally.”
http://bit.ly/2kvH9RX
Article 31
“The story of the Max is ultimately the story of the Darwinian business cycle where mature companies like Boeing face constant threats from new products, new competitors, and the search for new growth. Sometimes this motivates them to new heights of innovation and progress. Other times, it prompts them to pull everything back in the name of cost-cutting.”
http://bit.ly/2k73mVZ
Article 30
“I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.
https://nyti.ms/2lzOhfW
Article 29
“To celebrate the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900, a number of French artists were commissioned to produce a series of cigar box cards on the theme ‘En l’an 2000’. They came up with some fantastic imagery: in the future world they portrayed there was clearly going to be a great deal of aerial warfare and submarine sport, and a lot of electricity. The denizens of the year 2000 would put on their makeup with electricity, they would farm with electricity, and travel everywhere by electricity.” http://bit.ly/2HbQ3vZ
Article 28
“Technology companies engage in “data relations,” which turn our daily lives into a highly profitable “data stream.” This process enacts “a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data, just as historic colonialism appropriated territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit.” Ultimately, they believe, data colonialism “paves the way for a new stage of capitalism whose outlines we only glimpse: the capitalization of life without limit.””
http://bit.ly/2OXHbQM
Article 27
“His models bear striking resemblance to the one-dimensional cellular automata—life-like lattices of numerical patterns—championed by Stephen Wolfram, whose search tool Wolfram Alpha helps power the brain of Siri on the iPhone. Nonconformist biologist Craig Venter, in defending his creation of a cell with a synthetic genome—“the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer”—echoes Barricelli.”
http://bit.ly/2TkiUmt
Article 26
The term Beats by Dre” was already coined through the failed collaboration, and SLS had come up with a rough prototype headphone that would shape the entire lineup though the present day: giant ear cups, a thick, streamlined headband, and enough gloss for a Formula 1 car. ”
http://bit.ly/2LfeIn1
Article 25
Facebook’s response would be to adopt a “mature role”, not “shunning” but “advocating” the new rules. For a company that has fiercely resisted new laws, Clegg’s message aimed to persuade us that the page had turned. Yet his remarks sounded like Newspeak, as if to obscure ugly facts.
http://bit.ly/2XhVQVO
Article 24
In a relatively coherent set of texts by a single author, a writer’s idiosyncratic linguistic choices leave a mark analogous to a fingerprint. In order to recognize that fingerprint, you need a reasonably large, reasonably similar set of texts to compare with the one you’re curious about, and the one you’re curious about should be long enough to exhibit the fingerprint patterns.
http://bit.ly/2YpzFhM
Article 23
Facebook, in short, is here to help. The immensely arrogant assumption baked into this project, of course, is that the world’s unbanked need access to financial services, much less those furnished by Facebook and its partners like Mastercard and Uber.
http://bit.ly/2ZMkKyp
Article 22
Small but super interesting article. Answered one long standing question I had in my life. Where in life is ever something like fourier transform being used. Must Read. “The Fourier transform also tells you how much of each note contributes to the song, so you know which ones are essential. The really high notes aren’t so important (our ears can barely hear them), so MP3s throw them out, resulting in added data compression. Audiophiles don’t like MP3s for this reason—it’s not a lossless audio format, and they claim they can hear the difference.”
http://bit.ly/2Rg7krs
Article 21
New vendors will offer free samples and price-match guarantees to establish their reputation. Promotional campaigns are rife on April 20, also known as Pot Day, the darknet’s equivalent of Black Friday. (The date of Pot Day comes from the North American slang term for smoking cannabis which is 4/20.) “It’s not anonymity, Bitcoins, or encryption that ensure the future success of darknet markets,” writes Jamie Bartlett, author of The Dark Net. “The real secret of Silk Road is great customer service.”
http://bit.ly/2QQr1pu
Article 20
“Dyson had been given £1,000 for travel costs in 1918 (about $75,000 today). During wartime, that was an enormous grant – he decided he could stretch that money to cover expeditions to both sites, important insurance against bad weather or other mishap, dramatically increasing the chance of success.””
http://bit.ly/2HIjE0t
Article 19
“The paper tells you how to make small crystals of the alpha form, which is not too bad, as long as you keep it moist and in the dark, and never, ever, do anything with it. You can make larger crystals, too, by a different procedure, but heed the authors when they say: “This procedure is only recommended on a small scale, since crystalline α-Hg(N3)2 is very sensitive to impact and friction even if it is wet. Heavy detonations occur frequently if crystalline α-Hg(N3)2 is handled in dry state”.”
http://bit.ly/2M6ukdC
Article 18
“And yet, the meaning of “deep” in this context comes simply from the fact that these neural networks have more layers (12, say) than do older networks, which might have only two or three. But does that sort of depth imply that whatever such a network does must be profound? Hardly. This is verbal spinmeistery.””the bridging act not only should maintain clarity, but also should give a sense for the flavor, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of the writing style of the original author”
http://bit.ly/2M4Lx74
Article 17
“Aging has no point; it is the infuriating absence of a point. Having reproduced ourselves externally, we fall down on replicating ourselves internally. The processes of cellular replication that allow us to be boats rebuilt even as they cross the ocean cease acting efficiently, because they have no evolutionary reward for acting efficiently. They are like code monkeys in a failing tech business: they can mess up everything, absent-mindedly forget to code for the color of our hair or the elasticity of our skin, and no penalty is exacted for the failure. We’ve already made all the kids we are going to make.”
http://bit.ly/2HEvTtV
Article 16
I loved reading this article on the other side of Disney World. Fantastic piece of writing. Must read!”This is the story Americans have been sold: the one that pardons the powerful and makes us pay for our own numbness. We submit to a story that tells us we will be good—that we will be made good, and therefore safe—as long as we follow the rules, as long as we forget that there are rules. We enter the castle gates because there can be no danger here, no cruelty, and no adulthood, for as long as we believe: we will be saved not just from the harm that comes to those who are of no value here, but from the knowledge that they even exist. The dream still works, and it will work for at least a little longer. Buy a ticket. See if it’s worth the price.”
http://bit.ly/2JIjW9a
Article 15
“When British manufacturers installed power looms in their factories, workers lost their jobs, and the unemployed masses, desperate for work, dragged down wages for everyone. Those who remained, produced more in less time, earning greater profits for their bosses even as wages slipped. Mechanization simply meant workers spent a greater fraction of their day producing value for someone else.”
http://bit.ly/2VbS7bu
Article 14
“The Earth is, in some ways, in a precarious spot in the solar system. There’s a range of orbital distances inside which a planet can have both liquid surface water (which is believed to be necessary for life) and enough atmospheric CO2 to carry on photosynthesis. This range is called the photosynthesis habitable zone. The Earth orbits barely within the sun’s zone. Some scientists estimate that the inner edge lies just 7.5 million kilometers away, which is only 5 percent of the distance between the Earth and the sun.”
http://bit.ly/2Jd5NQZ
Article 13
“With eight movie ratings (of which two may be completely wrong) and dates that may have a 14-day error, 99% of records can be uniquely identified in the dataset.” The research showed that for many people, much less information is required to establish unicity: “For 68% [of users], two ratings and dates (with a three-day error) are sufficient.””
http://bit.ly/2GX1NBk
Article 12
“The high-powered cameras send what they see to 16 monitoring centers in Ecuador that employ more than 3,000 people. Armed with joysticks, the police control the cameras and scan the streets for drug deals, muggings and murders. If they spy something, they zoom in.This voyeur’s paradise is made with technology from what is fast becoming the global capital of surveillance: China.”
https://nyti.ms/2LcqizR
Article 11
“At night, I would read and take notes on the device in bed, in a tent, on a train. It was an incredible user experience, full of perceived value, delightful in its absurdity. Most importantly, using the device in these ways felt like an investment in the future of books and reading. Each Kindle book I bought was a vote with the wallet: yes – digital books! Every note I took, every underline I made was contributing to a vast lattice collection of reader knowledge that would someday manifest in ways beautiful or interesting or otherwise yet unknowable.”
http://bit.ly/2DBr4jD
Article 10
“This has the potential to have very destructive fallout for the open source world,” Zitzman says. “When a corporate giant like AWS doesn’t play fair, they are actually shooting themselves in the foot, as they will eventually find themselves without open technologies to roll out.”
http://bit.ly/2ZuhY1L
Article 9
“The problem is that, online, we think we’re reconnecting to that smaller grid—we follow our IRL friends, like their posts, and watch their stories! —when that connection is really mediated by a corporate entity less human than the magazine editors or television producers of the past. We are in the grid of social-media users created by that 21st-century bogeyman, the Algorithm. Loosely defined, the Algorithm—Twitter’s, Facebook’s, Spotify’s, Amazon’s, Google’s, so on and so forth—mediates what we read, watch, and listen to online, encouraging us to consume whatever appears on the screen. It regulates how often we get updates from our friends, whose unpopular posts or opinions we might not see if we don’t seek them out. Based on the data it collects, it can tell when we’re flush, lonely, engaged, or pregnant and then sell us products accordingly.”
http://bit.ly/2PnSpuC
Article 8
“When the execs are extremely smart people making ten times what you do, there’s a tendency to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
http://bit.ly/2v3lwKd
Article 7
“The moment she stepped off the elevator, she was met by co-worker after co-worker who needed and wanted to talk to her — one about a health concern, another about his kid excelling at school, another about a disintegrating marriage. She comforted, celebrated with, and listened to each one in turn. She didn’t, however, price the product.”
http://bit.ly/2YQAtNx
Article 6 “YouTube doesn’t give an exact recipe for virality. But in the race to one billion hours, a formula emerged: Outrage equals attention. It’s one that people on the political fringes have easily exploited, said Brittan Heller, a fellow at Harvard University’s Carr Center. “They don’t know how the algorithm works,” she said. “But they do know that the more outrageous the content is, the more views.””
https://bloom.bg/2VnbVt2
Article 5
“Personally, I feel as if I have suddenly gained all that I want in life and no longer have anything to fear. I am perfectly content both mentally and emotionally. All the tension slips from my body and I feel warm and utterly comfortable, as if I were sitting beside a roaring fire, wrapped in a delicate cashmere blanket, rocking gently back and forth. Communication is pleasant but unnecessary. Under the influence of oxycodone, no companionship is needed. I accept myself and the world just as we are, not begrudgingly, but eagerly, ecstatically even.”
http://bit.ly/2uwyJuT
Article 4
“Today, electric vehicles look like the best way to slash both sorts of pollution, another place where the goals of a healthy climate and healthy bodies converge. Electricity by itself is no guarantee of climate friendliness. But it is a necessary prerequisite to powering cars from clean sources such as wind and solar.”
http://bit.ly/2Fvi5lB
Article 3
“But, of course, companies design for performance and sales, not life span. They make money when they sell more units, and they’re not financially responsible for disposing of products when consumers are finished using them. Nadim Maluf, the founder of the battery consultancy Qnovo, told me that a decade ago, he went to big tech companies telling them he could help them double the longevity of their products, by extending the life of the lithium-ion batteries they were beginning to use. “No one really cared,” he told me. “Extending product life wasn’t consistent with growth on the financial side.””
http://bit.ly/2HNzLdJ
Article 2
“Since 2012, Chinese GDP has grown at an annual rate of 6-8 per cent – weaker than in the pre-crisis period (growth peaked at 14 per cent in 2007) – but still strong enough to support the growth of the Chinese middle class and stimulate the economies of its major trading partners. The US recovery has been slow by historic standards but growth in 2018 (2.9 per cent) was buoyed by Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which dramatically inflated corporate profits. Japan’s growth has been low but stable – unsurprising in view of its rapidly falling population (which declined by 449,000 in 2018). Only the eurozone has continued to struggle, growing by just 1.8 per cent in 2018.”
http://bit.ly/2CuMXkd
Article 1
“Looking at this incredible flurry of funding and activity, it’s worth asking: These companies have done so much—upended labor markets, changed industries, rewritten the definition of a job—and for what, exactly?””The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand.””For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one” “What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different people.”
http://bit.ly/2TH5Mvh
Curated Reading list for CAT – Psychology & Philosophy | 2
This post contains loads of articles categorised under Psychology and Philosophy. These are handpicked articles over the course of years for CAT Aspirants. This is the last of 2 posts. Click on the following link to go to the previous post: LINK here.
Every Article will have blurb, either written by me or an extract from the original post (mostly the latter) followed by the link to reach the article.
Article 123
A journey in releasing expectations
Article 122
Parasitic Whiteness on and off the couch
Article 121
The framework of life for anxious beings
Article 120
When Your Job Fills In for Your Faith, That’s a Problem
Article 119
When it comes to lasting romance, passion has nothing on friendship.
Article 118
“What Know-It-Alls Don’t Know, Or The Illusion of Competence”
Article 117
“The First Authoritarian. Popper’s Plato”
Article 116
“primordial love
Some scents never change”
Article 115
“Wait, that pen is doing WHAT?”
Article 114
“Ultimately, few have the training and understanding to know what counts as a serious examination of evidence under conditions of patchy knowledge. The rest of us engage in confirmation bias, seeking out what we regard as the most credible voices that have defended what we are already disposed to believe.”
Article 113
“Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can”
Article 112
“Doctors are of course trained to view every problem through the lens of disease. But what happens when artists do the same?”
https://bit.ly/3HBd6gs
Article 111
“For the first time in my life, the crushing anxiety of trauma overtook me, my body on such constant high alert that I literally didn’t sleep for weeks and later had to be briefly hospitalized myself, the staff shoving adult coloring books in front of me as my milk leaked onto everything, teenage depressives staring with wide eyes at the growing saucer stains on my shirt.”
https://bit.ly/3JunTL0
Article 110
“Imagination isn’t just a spillover from our problem-solving prowess. It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do.”
https://bit.ly/3BZPu1P
Article 109
“If humans were to disappear from the face of the Earth, what might dogs become? And would they be better off without us?”
https://bit.ly/2ZFhYR5
Article 108
“War and Peace through a different lens”
https://bit.ly/3CkKsxT
Article 107
“Our beliefs and emotions seem so personal to us, but they’re connected to what people around us do. Our minds change, sometimes without our understanding why. We can suddenly start to question something we once took for granted. It might be something trivial, like whether or not women over 30 should wear leggings, or something more profound, like whether anyone has the right to voice an opinion about what women over 30 should wear.”
https://bit.ly/3j7Td6V
Article 106
“For 50 years, Enthusiastic Sobriety programs have promised to help teenagers kick drug and alcohol addiction. But former followers say ES doesn’t save lives – it destroys them.”
https://bit.ly/3lVxmA5
Article 105
“Help is a funny word. My first interactions with it were almost always ones of violence. A character in a movie cried for help. Someone was hurt, always. They needed help. They needed help now. The way they needed help was obvious. They were trapped under metal. They were physically crushed. A bone was broken. Blood was on their clothes. If help didn’t arrive soon, then the help would arrive too late. And then there were tears. And there was no helping those.”
https://bit.ly/3kCa8Qg
Article 104
“Empathy is, at heart, an aesthetic appreciation of the other”
https://bit.ly/3kBPeQ0
Article 103
“The Opposite of Toxic Positivity
“Tragic optimism” is the search for meaning during the inevitable tragedies of human existence, and is better for us than avoiding darkness and trying to “stay positive.””
http://bit.ly/3kCAsID
Article 102
“NIETZSCHE: The Übermensch (Overman)”
http://bit.ly/387jNHt
Article 101
“Other People’s Despair | Mending the Social Fabric Won’t Fix the Suicide Crisis”
https://bit.ly/3mkNFIC
Article 100
“To learn from a psychedelic trip, explore the dreams that follow
The psychedelic renaissance is fully upon us. Clinicians, directors of spiritual communities and others are engaged in the implementation of a bevy of psychedelic medicines to treat everything from major depression to problematic substance use to existential angst.”
https://bit.ly/3mdAzwK
Article 99
“Deep Intellect
Inside the mind of the octopus”
https://bit.ly/37PRDRa
Article 98
“What a Cult Steals from You
Money. Time. Bodily integrity.
Relationships. Opportunity. Altruism.”
http://bit.ly/3xJHX4U
Article 97
“Under pressure: why athletes choke
What makes an elite sports star suddenly unable to do the very thing they have been practising for years? And is there anything they can do about it?”
https://bit.ly/3xlhk68
Article 96
“Hi, Dear
The internet was meant to transform how India falls in love. Instead, it revolutionised how we creep each other out.”
http://bit.ly/3C0ndJK
Article 95
“The Most Dangerous Censorship
Invisible but present, and far from the eyes of the public”
http://bit.ly/3i8vGTa
Article 94
“Doing the Naked Macarena
Why I would go on a naked cruise again in a heartbeat”
http://bit.ly/3zJM0zw
Article 93
“Imagine you could insert knowledge into your mind: should you?”
https://bit.ly/3zviEVy
Article 92
”The Epidemic of Isolation Among Young Men
Why are we so squeamish about male friendship?”
http://bit.ly/3r5jpSt
Article 91
”How to gain more from your reading
There’s more to words than meets the eye. Deepen your appreciation of literature through the art of slow, attentive reading”
https://bit.ly/3i4r0wb
Article 90
”The Hazards of a “Nice” Company Culture”
Article 89
“The Talk
A new sex ed program for boys asks them to explore the question of what makes a good man”
https://bit.ly/3yISWgH
Article 88
“The Omnipresence of Work
Humankind holds power over its creations for one silly reason: The mind doesn’t have an off switch.”
https://bit.ly/3fuJ0Pg
Article 87
“Recognising the rhythm in addiction offers new ways to escape it
Barut was a heavy user of heroin substitutes and crack when we met in Paris in 2014. He’d grown up in what he called a ‘broken home’ in Bulgaria, and started with hard drugs early. Heroin then caught him during construction jobs in Spain and later in Paris.”
https://bit.ly/2S7NYJx
Article 86
“When Your Disorder Doesn’t Exist
‘Medically unexplained’ symptoms are as misunderstood as they are common. Here’s what I wish people knew.”
http://bit.ly/3uMpkgf
Article 85
“The Sexual Identity That Emerged on TikTok
Amid progress toward transgender acceptance, the social-media war over “super-straight” shows how not to resolve delicate questions about dating norms.”
http://bit.ly/33rO8y9
Article 84
“If you think you’ve got a porn addiction, you probably haven’t”
https://bit.ly/3nGWQ4G
Article 83
“The Identity Hoaxers
What if people don’t just invent medical symptoms to get attention—what if they feign oppression, too?”
https://bit.ly/3apBovG
Article 82
“The Weak Case for Grit
Where’s the evidence that grit predicts success?”
https://bit.ly/3tznBub
Article 81
“It’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.
“To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends.
The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.”
http://bit.ly/3cI0GXr
Article 80
“Stereotypical portrayals too often focus on the rituals and portray none of the nuanced, often agonized thinking behind them. Consequently, it’s become common—and even acceptable—for anyone who likes things in order or who keeps a clean house to use the OCD label to describe themselves.
“I’m so OCD” has become a joke, a shorthand for being clean or organized.”
http://bit.ly/3rBvrkT
Article 79
“What Makes You You?
When you say the word “me,” you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It’s one of the things you’re clearest on in the whole world—something you’ve understood since you were a year old. You might be working on the question, “Who am I?” but what you’re figuring out is the who am part of the question—the I part is obvious. It’s just you. Easy.”
https://bit.ly/30yevkj
Article 78
“How to speak in public
Public speaking can feel like an ordeal, but take a lesson from the ancients: it’s a skill you can develop like any other”
http://bit.ly/3v0rc5i
Article 77
“The superpower of tomorrow? Being “indistractable” Learn how to take back control of your attention span”
http://bit.ly/3bWpOrY
Article 76
“The Pascal of the North‘Philosopher of the Heart’”
http://bit.ly/3bJnq7E
Article 75
“The Science Behind Miracles
How our minds push our bodies to defy expectations, beliefs, and even our own biology—in short, to make miracles”
https://bit.ly/2ZnJMpr
Article 74
“The Internet of Beefs”
http://bit.ly/3rK4hJh
Article 73
“The overall summary of all of this is that they’re bad forgetters,” he said. And forgetting is what humans do; often what we need to do.
The “peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remembering,” wrote William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, “is the very keel on which our mental ship is built.” “If we remembered everything,” he continued, “we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.””
http://bit.ly/3qprY8U
Article 72
“A Deeper Longing
The teenagers often ask me, “Aren’t you sad that you will never have sex?” I answer: “Yes, a part of me is sad about that, but it is not a hopeless sadness.” Sadness and loneliness are part of the point of celibacy. “
http://bit.ly/3rIDm12
Article 71
“The mystery of the Gatwick drone
A drone sighting caused the airport to close for two days in 2018, but despite a lengthy police investigation, no culprit was ever found. So what exactly did people see in the Sussex sky?”
https://bit.ly/39Rsesy
Article 70
“In Nyāya philosophy only some debates are worth having
In premodern India, debates were entertainment in courtly settings, a sport for profiteers and clever men who enjoyed a quick turn of phrase or put-down. Successful debaters gained followers, fame, even wealth.”
http://bit.ly/2JY5sVn
Article 69
“In the chaos of raising a toddler there lies a path to nirvana
It’s hard to be philosophical if you’re worried about paying rent or your physical safety.”
https://bit.ly/3g9fZsa
Article 68
“Commodity of Doom
Elegies for the cigarette”
https://bit.ly/3eUv7Je
Article 67
“The problem with love is deciding who’s doing the dishes”
https://bit.ly/3eslphj
Article 66
“How to Stop Feeling Crushed for Time
Quit worrying whether time is money. Start appreciating time’s true value.”
https://bit.ly/34ZaZTg
Article 65
“How a Bizarre Claim About Masks Has Lived on for Months
Why the wrong idea that wearing a mask can harm your health has lived on through multiple debunkings”
https://bit.ly/3nRF6Dn
Article 64
“Now you see it
Our brains predict the outcomes of our actions, shaping reality into what we expect. That’s why we see what we believe”
https://bit.ly/36XvK2N
Article 63
“What We Lose When We Hide Our Smiles Behind a Mask”
https://bit.ly/33ln5VG
Article 62
“Denham offered his sign in 1575. A mirrored question mark, he hoped, would flag up a rhetorical question, making it easier to get the drift of the writer’s intention. But it never caught on.”
https://bit.ly/36c8iyA
Article 61
“Kierkegaard on Why Anxiety Powers Creativity Rather Than Hindering It
“Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self… — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.””
https://bit.ly/3mFR2rd
Article 60
“The self of self-help books is adrift from social and economic facts”
https://bit.ly/2Pw3FWn
Article 59
“Is Everyone Depressed?
Suddenly, many people meet the criteria for clinical depression. Doctors are scrambling to determine who needs urgent intervention, and who is simply the new normal.”
https://bit.ly/3f6mpWZ
Article 58
“Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered”
https://bbc.in/2WJFeZU
Article 57
“The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic
The minute we make any decision—I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative.”
https://bit.ly/2ZEWQrp
Article 56
“Army Ranger School Is a Laboratory of Human Endurance.
The military’s toughest training challenges have a lot in common with outdoor sufferfests like the Barkley Marathons and the Leadville Trail 100: you have to be fit and motivated to make the starting line, but your mind and spirit are what carry you to the end. A Ranger graduate breaks down an ordeal that shapes some of the nation’s finest soldiers.”
https://bit.ly/3heRVmX
Article 55
“The privilege of boredom
How philosophy can happen in isolation”
https://bit.ly/2NExRhc
Article 54
“There have always been drug addicts in need of help, but the scale of the present wave of heroin and . . “
https://bit.ly/2YbZmot
Article 53
“A touch of absurdity can help to wrap your mind around reality
And now for something completely different: how a dose of the surreal or absurd helps to make sense of our place in the world”
https://bit.ly/2Y5q8NZ
Article 52
“How to Master the Invisible Hand That Shapes Our Lives”
https://bit.ly/2U4EgpE
Article 51
“I share dozens of links on Twitter and Facebook. But how many do I read in full? How many do I share after reading the full thing? Honestly—and I feel comfortable saying this because even mom’s stopped reading at this point—not too many.”
https://bit.ly/2XChR3Y
Article 50
“Impostor syndrome: do you sometimes feel like a fraud?
Many people feel like they are just waiting to be found out. Clancy Martin investigates the modern epidemic of impostor syndrome”
https://bit.ly/2ZJYgl0
Article 49
“Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours
My life seemed to be getting busier, faster: I felt constantly short of time – so I stepped outside it for a day and a night and did nothing.”
https://bit.ly/3bBiSxW
Article 48
“Gradually, the notion of nostalgia attached itself almost exclusively to soldiers—Swiss mercenaries being very popular hires in armies across the continent and doctors being a regular part of army life. It would take a little more than two centuries for doctors to figure out that there might be something more than a mysterious nerve disorder causing young men whose sole job was dismembering other humans and dying gruesomely to yearn for the comforts of home”
https://bit.ly/3dTJuw3
Article 47
“If we are to settle the Solar System astronauts will have to travel for months and years. Are these missions too taxing for human minds?”
https://bbc.in/3cWyZr8
Article 46
“If society is fractured today, if we truly care less about one another, some of the blame lies with the values parents have elevated. In our own lives, we’ve observed many fellow parents becoming so focused on achievement that they fail to nurture kindness. They seem to regard their children’s accolades as a personal badge of honor—and their children’s failures as a negative reflection on their own parenting.”
https://bit.ly/3bs0ecY
Article 45
“Nothing has all of the ingredients for the emotional breakdown recipe quite like a pandemic-induced global shutdown. Lack of face-to-face socializing and general social isolation? Check. Financial uncertainty and mass unemployment? Check. Lack of regular exercise, sunlight, and access to basic necessities? Check. High uncertainty of one’s safety and security in the near future? Check. Tons of free-time to refresh news feeds five thousand times per day? Double check.”
https://bit.ly/2VCy9ZI
Article 44
“What is wrong with this picture? Why do modern ‘evidence-based’ treatments fail to produce better outcomes? Indeed, why do things seem to be getting worse, with many forms of suffering, even suicide, on the rise?
Sigmund Freud said that work and love are the cornerstones of our lives and human meaning, and the kinds of transformations in work and love that I was able to achieve are exactly what Freud said good therapy of depth, insight and relationship is for.”
https://bit.ly/2RIy0mr
Article 43
“More than five tonnes of Calpol is sold every day – and more than 12 million units each year. Other brands cost half the price, but Calpol has 70% of the market for children’s pain-relief medicine, which is three times the share of its nearest competitor and 50 times more than the next most popular brand of paracetamol. For British parents, Calpol is overwhelmingly the drug of choice.”
https://bit.ly/2WvNdKO
Article 42
“Jacob is just one of a growing number of people seeking inspiration from business schools rather than poetry in the quest to find the right partner. This hard-headed attitude is evident in the practical turn that romance’s ardent lexicon has taken in recent years. We look for partners, not soulmates. We avoid deal-breakers. “Are you in the right headspace to receive information that might hurt you?” reads a recent meme, advising people to ask loved ones for consent before making demands on their emotional labour.”
http://bit.ly/33AcPaQ
Article 41
Brilliant writeup on life and What is important. CAT Aspirant or not, this is a must read.
“On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not.”
http://bit.ly/38G0nI2
Article 40
“In this vehicle that dwarfed even the beefiest of men, Schwarzenegger saw a business opportunity. He contacted AM General, the heavy-automotive manufacturer behind the Humvee (the military vehicle on which the Hummer is based) and other purpose-driven vehicles, to communicate his adoration. He was sure the Hummer needed to be made available for purchase to regular people, and though the company was initially hesitant, the Hummer was introduced to the civilian market in 1992.”
http://bit.ly/36KEgOQ
Article 39
“In a famous experiment, when participants were presented with evidence counter to their political beliefs, areas of their brain associated with physical pain became more active — it’s as if being wrong physically hurts.”
http://bit.ly/2PZIPQB
Article 38
“PICTURE THIS: everyone in your life is obsessed with ice cream, and you just don’t understand the hype. You’ve tasted it, and maybe you’ve even enjoyed it from time to time, but you don’t actively crave it like the people around you seem to—nor do you centre your life around it like they do. “Can’t wait to get some ice cream!” they effervesce in tweets and Facebook posts, and you wonder why. Dates with potential romantic partners, and even get-togethers with friends, often seem organized around the acquisition or discussion of ice cream, pushing you further into an isolation that feels like your own doing.”
http://bit.ly/3917884
Article 37
“I know I’m not alone. We all know that person: there’s the child minder who is always late, the colleague who misses every deadline, even if just by a few hours, the friend you must tell to arrive 30 minutes earlier than she needs to for your lunch reservation.”
https://bbc.in/2rThZAo
Article 36
“The most surprising result of the study was that the non-demanding task was actually better than doing nothing,” Schooler says. Why this is so, however, is less clear. “My best guess is that if you’re engaged in a non-demanding task, it kind of prevents you from having long trains of thought,” Schooler posits. “It’s sort of churning things up, stirring the pot, so you’re not maintaining one thought for a particularly long time. There are a lot of different ideas going in and out, and that sort of associative process leads to creative incubation.”
http://bit.ly/2YSDRYn
Article 35
“From now on, he always consults the dice. Since it has six sides, he gives it six options. The first is to do what he has always done. The five others depart more or less distinctly from this routine. Once it has been subjected to the dice, even the most anodyne choice – that of a film, a restaurant – opens a vast array of possibilities for putting your routine behind you.”
http://bit.ly/2EerJHQ
Article 34
“Ironically, accusing others of virtue signalling might itself constitute virtue signalling – just signalling to a different audience. Whether it should be counted as virtue signalling or not, the accusation does exactly what it accuses others of: it moves the focus from the target of the moral claim to the person making it. It can therefore be used to avoid addressing the moral claim made.”
http://bit.ly/2P9Dx2Y
Article 33
Brilliant passage that delves deep on solitude, herd mentality, moral stance, introspection, leadership and many other ideas in a beautiful, coherent way. Must Read.
“Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.”
http://bit.ly/2lW7nxe
Article 32
“They would follow him from room to room, everywhere he went in the house, and lie down next to him while he slept. Crawled on, dribbled on, kicked, elbowed and kneed: these occurrences were all treated with a resigned fatalism. The fingers in the eye they received on a daily basis would be shrugged off with an almost Zen-like calm. In many respects, they were better parents than me. If my son so much as squeaked during the night, I would instantly feel two cold noses pressed in my face: get up, you negligent father — your son needs you.”
http://bit.ly/2ZlSRNa
Article 31
“I broke this cycle when my daughters were born and I realised that it would be irresponsible to stop treatment because being a good father meant having a stable mood. It was a purely pragmatic decision, made without resolving the existential issues that antidepressants had raised for me before. That being the case, I do not write with the fervour of the newly converted, although sometimes I speculate about how much smoother my life would have been had I decided much sooner to stick to the antidepressants.”
http://bit.ly/2N5oKqL
Article 30
“Never underestimate the willingness of a man to believe flattering things about himself.” Samuelson was not a behavioral economist, but he clearly recognized that people’s self-assessments were often higher than warranted by objective evidence. In surveys, for example, more than 90 percent of people describe themselves as above-average drivers. The same self-assessment was reported by more than 80 percent of drivers surveyed while they were in the hospital recovering from accidents, many of which they had surely caused themselves.
http://bit.ly/2Tjtw4Y
Article 29
“The worker is the hamster, consumer culture is the hamster wheel. People are tricked into believing that Furbies, iPads and all those other pointless goods and services are necessary for a happy and fulfilled existence. A sense of ‘meaning’ has been replaced with instant, short-term, on-demand happiness.”
http://bit.ly/30ZbCaC
Article 28
Freud believed that, over the course of human history, humankind had suffered three ‘great outrages upon its naïve self-love’. First, there was Copernicus, who, with his finding that the Earth revolved around the Sun, showed that we were not at the centre of the Universe; second, there was Charles Darwin who, with his theory of evolution, showed that we emerged from the animal kingdom, and did not exist apart from it; last, there was Freud himself (he was never one for modesty), via whom psychoanalysis had shown that man was ‘not even master in his own house’ due to the massive effects of the unconscious.
http://bit.ly/2SdCb8I
Article 27
Vohs, who has studied the effect of choice on consumers for many years, found in a recent project that even making pleasant choices can deplete one’s mental resources, making a person less able to concentrate later.
http://bit.ly/2RYv6st
Article 26
At night, the sky is a watercolor wash. Sunset tries to push in but day resists, never giving over to real darkness, instead smudging the blue over the glaciers peach and mauve. Waterfalls of glacial rock glow rose and coral in the perma-dusk. Clouds roll in just to catch the pinkish light. Distant peaks are scoops of sorbet. Everything seems impossibly far apart, held together precariously in any moment by the eye, always about to drift even farther.
http://bit.ly/2YDZScR
Article 25
Lunch usually consisted of salad. I would choose three different vegetables or fruits. The first thing I would do was smell the items for freshness and run my fingers over them—a process that filled me with a mixture of delight and disgust. “These are pure enough,” I used to say to myself. Then I would go about washing each one, cutting them in a set order, weighing each portion, and methodically arranging the foods on a plate.
http://bit.ly/2FqAe3G
Article 24
A phobia is generally considered “an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation”.
Mussolini didn’t eat mashed potatoes because they gave him a headache. Idi Amin doesn’t seem like he’d have been a fussy eater, but he had his limits, “I tried human flesh, and it is too salty for my taste.” Of course the reader can’t be sure if this flesh was raw or cooked: if the latter, then surely the saltiness was the fault of the cook.
http://bit.ly/2Mzqbix
Article 23
Forget about RC. Forget about reading practice. Forget about CAT. Read this brilliant and short write-up about scarcity, abundance and generosity.
“Imagine that out of the blue, you tell your child you’re going to go for ice cream. Five minutes later, tell them you’ve changed your mind and you’ll go some other time.”
http://bit.ly/2QEzMmO
Article 22
“I don’t understand how people…live. It’s amazing to me that people wake up every morning and say, ‘Yeah, another day, let’s do it.’ How do people do it? I don’t know how.”
“It doesn’t matter where you are, it’s who you are. And that’s not gonna change whether you’re in California or Maine or New Mexico. You know, you can’t escape…you.”
http://bit.ly/2Xfwetr
Article 21
“Flashback to early capitalism: the Protestant ethic sucked up happy-go-lucky peasants and churned out industrious wage slaves. Flash forward to digital capitalism, which sucks up helpless little babies and churns out Facebook slaves who labour for the likes and turn the conversation to themselves at every opportunity.
Basically, narcissism is the new herpes. It’s not like you got it on purpose, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now everyone’s pointing fingers and trying to pretend they don’t have it, too. Hence the blame game.”
http://bit.ly/30K32Nj
Article 20
Brilliant perception of death and grief. Will make lot more sense if you have ever lost someone close to heart.
“Death really is the manifestation of the ordinary to everyone except the griever. Barthes’s experience of looking at the Winter Garden image cannot be reproduced because his loss cannot be reproduced. If by merely looking at Henriette as a child we could feel what Barthes feels, grief would be translatable in a way that anyone who has grieved knows it is certainly not.”
http://bit.ly/2Qo0CiB
Article 19
“Three features of the definition stand out: the outsider status of intellectuals, their extraordinariness or even their singularity, and their politics.”
“He’s driving his truck, saying “Taco should be a verb.” The taco, he says, is heated on the griddle, and the counterman slides meat onto it and sauces it and hands it to you and you eat it, all in one extended motion. “I know it’s overly romantic,””
http://bit.ly/2wmW9Ux
Article 18
“Take Immanuel Kant’s elegant formulation of how to do the right thing: act in ways that could be generalized to universal principles. You’ll choose the right thing to do, every time, if you ask yourself: If everyone acted in this way, would the world be a better place? Reason will always guide you to the right answer, and to its corollary, which is that we should treat others never as means but always as ends in themselves. The narcissist, in contrast, always chooses to act in exactly such a way that if everyone were to follow suit, the world would go straight to hell.”
http://bit.ly/2Hr7klq
Article 17
“More practically, the idea of niksen is to take conscious, considered time and energy to do activities like gazing out of a window or sitting motionless. The less-enlightened might call such activities “lazy” or “wasteful.” Again: nonsense.”
https://nyti.ms/2HcH2lq
Article 16
“At the time, this was a radical idea – and it still is. It essentially suggests that the brain makes no distinction between a broken bone and an aching heart. Rejection, it tells us, actually hurts.
‘It’s not just in our head. It is in our head because it’s in our brain.’
Some participants were told that everyone had picked them, while others were told that no one had. In the end, when all the students rated their feelings, the rejected group showed no change in emotions: instead of feeling upset, they seemed to have become emotionally numb.”
http://bit.ly/2PG0s6c
Article 15
“Today, with the pollution that new technologies have brought to our information ecosystem, this distinction is no longer so easy to make. And this is the real problem, and danger, of satire: not that it mocks and belittles respect-worthy pieties, not that it “punches down,” but that it has become impossible to separate it cleanly from the toxic disinformation that defines our era.”
https://nyti.ms/2Isjj2G
Article 14
“Narcissism gives you the confidence to believe you can achieve great things. It’s hard to imagine someone other than Steve Jobs having the grandiose vision of creating Apple. And we’re all drawn to that confidence — it’s why narcissists are more likely to rise up the ranks of the corporate elite and get elected to political office. But alone, narcissism is dangerous. Studies show that tech companies with narcissistic CEOs have more fluctuating, volatile performance.”
http://bit.ly/2VwE1Cg
Article 13
“My dissatisfaction was whiny and irrational, as I well knew, so I kept it to myself. When I thought about it—which I did, a lot—I rejected the term midlife crisis, because I was holding a steady course and never in fact experienced a crisis: more like a constant drizzle of disappointment. What annoyed me most of all, much more than the disappointment itself, was that I felt ungrateful, the last thing in the world I was entitled to be.”
http://bit.ly/2uPVzOb
Article 12
“This terrorism takes the form of what psychologists call ‘intrusive thoughts’ — unwanted, painful thoughts or images that invade one’s consciousness, triggering profound fear and anxiety. This is the ‘obsessive’ part of OCD, and it can arise in even the most mundane circumstances. Sitting here typing, for example, I sometimes feel modest pain in my fingers, and my mind kicks into gear: You’re typing too much and causing permanent damage to your hands. Feel those little irritations at the second knuckle of your left ring finger? Those are the harbingers of arthritis. This is how it starts.”
http://bit.ly/2U9qNPd
Article 11
““If you stop logging into Facebook, you’re not going to get the shakes and start vomiting and going into physical withdrawals,” Baumer says. It’s more like a gambling problem, he says, because “it’s less a question of addiction and more a question of impulse control.””
http://bit.ly/2Fxvfgy
Article 10
“If you tell me to calm down, I probably won’t. The same goes for: “be reasonable,” “get over it already,” “you’re overreacting,” “it was just a joke,” “it’s not such a big deal.” When someone minimizes my feelings, my self-protective reflexes kick in. My body, my mind, my job, my interests, my talents—these are all “mine”—but nothing has quite the power to declare itself as “mine” as a passionate emotion does. When waves of anger or love or grief wash over me, that emotion feels like life itself. It wells up from an innermost core, like my voice, which it usually inflects. And so if you move to tamp it down, I parry by shutting you out: I erect walls around my sanctum sanctorum, to shield the flame of my passion—my life—from your soul-quenching intrusions. Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot feel?!”
http://bit.ly/2Tdwu9P
Article 9
“In her book on international adoption, historian Karen Dubinsky writes about rumors circulating in Guatemala that foreigners abduct local children and turn them into sex slaves or steal their organs. Illustrating the power such falsehoods can have, tourists have been lynched as a result of the accusations.”
http://bit.ly/2TEpI0S
Article 8
Generally, when authors base their articles on research from studies,, I am cynical. But this is an idea that I definitely buy into – Anger leads to more anger. Anger, and as an extent, emotions can be contagious.
“He says when he wrote those angry tweets, he was in a bad place, angry at himself for letting his health deteriorate: “It was easy to snap back and snarl.” But Beatty says the empathy shown toward him changed him. He has begun to think, “People are good.” He realizes that politics divide people, but one on one, “people are caring, generous, helpful.” “
https://n.pr/2C0CtsI
Article 7
“You cannot convey the pure concussive terror of a panic attack in words either, the sense that all your bones are thrumming a bad, insistent chord. I have tried to explain why I must leave the restaurant, why I must have an aisle seat at the show, why sometimes my throat seizes so powerfully I can’t even drink water. Some friends and family members understand; others don’t; and I hide my phobias when I can.”
http://bit.ly/2UfFJHD
Article 6
“What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”
https://bit.ly/2NoK1tE
Article 5
When we are living in a world where we don’t have time for boredom, We might even get existential crisis if the sitcom that one’s watching gets over. I can’t remember a time in the last five years or so when I was bored. I do remember times when I was bored in my childhood and had lot of time to just be with my thoughts, imagination, creatures in my head and fantasy lands. Oh I wish I can get those back.
“You are bored. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it’s boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it’s on you to make life interesting, the better off you’ll be.”
https://nyti.ms/2UMvvhQ
Article 4
“I have read that Tinder users agree that one should “swipe left’” (i.e. reject) on any prospective mate or hookup who proclaims a fondness for, among other writers, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway or William S. Burroughs. I couldn’t care less about the first two of these, but Burroughs is very important to me. He played a vital role in shaping how I see the world (Cities of the Red Night, in particular), and I would want any person with whom I spend much time communicating to know this. I believe I have good reasons for valuing him, and would be happy to talk about these reasons.”
http://bit.ly/38v9gE5
Article 3
“I still have the memory of what it’s like when the depersonalisation lifts. Those are periods of such indescribable joy. They’re memories I try to hang on to when things get tough – memories of just sitting at my tiny kitchen table in my flat, without feeling the need to achieve or function or engage. Just being. Just living.”
http://bit.ly/37ceUdS
Article 2
“Wolf does not mean to suggest that non-moral equals immoral: just because something doesn’t have anything to do with morality (playing tennis, for instance) it does not follow that it is therefore morally bad. The point is that morality is, intuitively, focused on issues such as treating others equally, and on trying to relieve suffering. And good things these are: but so is holidaying with a friend, or exploring the Alaskan rain forest, or enjoying a curry. Moral goodness is just one aspect of the good things in life and, if you live as if the moral aspect is the only aspect that matters, then you are likely to be very impoverished in terms of the non-moral goods in your life. And that means missing out on a lot.”
http://bit.ly/2PM2tvJ
Article 1
“It had become, in Clark’s words, “transparent equipment.” And the physiological effects of losing that equipment were acute: my heart began to race in the Verizon store when the employee told me he was deactivating my phone, and in the following hours and days, I would frequently find myself reaching for my iPhone, the way a girl reaches for a non-existent ponytail after a drastic haircut. Of course, I would gradually begin to notice not being able to use Google Maps or post to Instagram, but the physical sense of loss was instantaneous and intense. I literally felt a part of me was missing.”
http://bit.ly/2uodfmT
Curated Reading list for CAT – Humans/Culture | 2
This post contains loads of articles categorised under Humans and Culture. These are handpicked articles over the course of years for CAT Aspirants. This is the last of 2 posts. Click on the following link to go to the previous post: LINK here.
Every Article will have blurb, either written by me or an extract from the original post (mostly the latter) followed by the link to reach the article.
Article 198
The Indian driver turned union leader is brushing shoulders with top politicians and giving ride-hailing firms a run for their money.
Article 197
340-pound penguins were once normal—and maybe they will be again someday.
Article 196
Supreme Court of India on Demonetization – A Farce in Three Acts
Article 195
Prince Harry’s memoir is the UK’s fastest-selling nonfiction book ever. Too busy to read it? All the love, rancour, drugs and petty fights are here
Article 194
Teleporting and psychedelic mushrooms: a history of St Nicholas, Santa and his helpers
Article 193
As a manager, a central part of your job is to develop people. But when you delegate a task to someone — with no prior training — simply because you are unavailable to do it, their chances of succeeding are slim
Article 192
What a year at the University of Oxford taught me about South Asians
Article 191
Yes the problem is porn: A response to Chanel Contos
Article 190
The massacre at Montreal’s Polytechnique school, fueled by misogyny, is not a horrifying memory confined to a bygone era – rather it seems like a foretelling of things to come
Article 189
I bid goodbye to my boxes
Article 188
Sustainability is about value creation as much as it is about resilience
Article 187
The private rebellions of Indian women
Article 186
A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
Article 185
Monday School
Let there be light!
Article 184
It is one of the best sites excavated after a century. All the artefacts unearthed are excellent.
Article 183
The Loneliest Man in the World
Watching Irrfan Khan over the years
Article 182
April showers hopes for maybe this time, flowers
Article 181
A televangelist, a TikTok bride, and the ever-present camera
Article 180
Celebrity chefs, food writers, and home cooks have sneered at pre-cut produce. They’re dismissing those of us with disabilities.
Article 179
Nobody Likes To Be Told What To Do
Article 178
Nazi or KGB agent? My search for my grandfather’s hidden past
Article 177
We’re Crossing the Threshold of Survivability — And There’s No Going Back
Article 176
Are you a baby? A litmus test
Article 175
Without meds, my back and hip are, to my surprise and delight, nearly pain-free
Article 174
We’ve become convinced that if we can eat more healthily, we will be morally better people. But where does this idea come from?
Article 173
Nate still hadn’t returned to the campsite. As the sunlight faded behind the mountains, the cool shadows creeping down their slopes, I pictured the clothes he had been wearing
Article 172
Five million payphone calls are still made each year in the UK. Who is making them – and why?
Article 171
Flour Trip
One woman’s journey into the heart of grain and how our flour is made
Article 170
“Shanghai Lockdown Diary: The Quest for Food Brings an Apartment Complex Together
Shanghai residents have become the digital equivalent of ancient hunter-gatherers”.
Article 169
“The Willy Wonka of Pot
A trip to Hempfest with pioneering cannabis breeder DJ Short”
Article 168
“A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world
What’s behind the indestructible appeal of the robotic snack?”
Article 167
“The Artful, Subdued Translations of Modern Pop”
Young artists like Latto, Vince Staples, and Doechii are subtly persuading listeners to rethink the way music genres can be interpreted.”
Article 166
“Athletics, IQ, Health: Three Myths of Race
An evolutionary biologist and biological anthropologist break down why differences in human athleticism, IQ, and health can’t be explained by the concept of race.”
Article 165
“Boomers Could Never Survive High School Today
Teens today are held to an absurdly high standard in comparison”
Article 164
“How we lost our sensory connection with food – and how to restore it
To eat in the modern world is often to eat in a state of profound sensory disengagement. It shouldn’t have to be this way”
Article 163
“Beautiful Lies
Why does public discourse about beauty remain so shallow?”
Article 162
“The Magic of the Japanese Convenience Store Sandwich”
Article 161
“How Filipino Sailors—and Coconuts—Helped Create Mexico’s National Drink”
Article 160
“What TikTok videos have in common with Victorian parlour games”
Article 159
“Khansama
A chef lifts the veil on his journey from home cook to TV stardom and the heat of the Indian restaurant kitchen.”
Article 158
“The Second-Book Problem
Finishing my first book meant powering through grief, but tackling the second has required another kind of grit.”
Article 157
An investigation into the enduring popularity of the watch brand that wears the crown
Article 156
What Was the TED Talk? | Some Thoughts on the “Inspiresting”
Article 155
“We hadn’t exchanged numbers, our exchange itself being too brief. This was truly a Tinder message-less, phone call-less, chance encounter. B said that if this was meant to be, if we were really meant to cross paths again, it would happen that evening. “
Article 154
“A new study blames flawed research and a confounding mistrust of common sense”
Article 153
“I’ve realised that very often the way I think things should go just isn’t right, to be honest. So I’ve become more open to experiencing things as they actually are, and not trying to control everything. It’s the same with acting. You can prep all you want, and it’s fun thinking about how this person’s going to react and whatever, but — and I don’t want to sound like a cunt here — but now I’m better at just letting the movie be what it wants to be. I’m more excited to discover how things are going to transpire in life.”
Article 152
“A personal history of how the internet came home, became magazine fodder, and changed a life”
https://bit.ly/3qrUIkf
Article 151
“I dug into my family history and discovered a tale of supernatural evil, buried treasure, and paranoia”
https://bit.ly/3qnId9g
Article 150
“It is a movie of the interregnum, one that could have been auto-generated by it.”
https://bit.ly/3t6tSQj
Article 149
“The frequent temptation to compare India in 1757 (when British rule was beginning) with India in 1947 (when the British were leaving) would tell us very little, because in the absence of British rule, India would of course not have remained the same as it was at the time of Plassey. The country would not have stood still had the British conquest not occurred. But how do we answer the question about what difference was made by British rule?”
https://bit.ly/30qZZhj
Article 148
This article is an exhilarating and a provocative read. History matters. As we debate slavery and dispute the role of empire, we have become accustomed to constant sparring over the past. As we seek new, sustainable ways to organize our world, we need to understand the full range of ways our ancestors thought and lived. And we must certainly question conventional versions of our history which we have accepted, unexamined, for far too long.
https://bit.ly/3Gz870b
Article 147
“Our survey suggests most people don’t even know what the culture war is”
https://bit.ly/3EjJ3rK
Article 146
“Why is Arkansas the driest state in America? Where do morality and geography crystalize?”
https://bit.ly/2Z8ldAf
Article 145
“These aspirations and pressures are reflected in a scene from the hit 2020 web series Panchayat. Two parents in a village are arguing about what to call their newborn son. The mother likes the traditional-sounding ‘Aatmaram,’ but the father wants ‘Aarav,’ after Twinkle Khanna and Akshay Kumar’s son.”
https://bit.ly/3FLrL8w
Article 144
“Debates about truth and deception have value, but they obscure the fact that documentaries have always been more akin to essays than articles. It would be hard to hold up an essay as proof of anything at all, except perhaps consciousness. They are dramas of a mind, or often several, learning, searching, and making things cohere.”
https://bit.ly/2YFfEJJ
Article 143
“For the K’iche’ Mayans, animals were not lower beings but neighbours, alter egos and a way to communicate with the gods”
https://bit.ly/3lhz27Z
Article 142
“Archaeological excavations across Tamil Nadu are reigniting the debate about India’s early history and the dawn of civilisation in the subcontinent.”
https://bit.ly/3lMa4MR
Article 141
“Where Will Everyone Go?
EARLY IN 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.”
https://bit.ly/3BOyeNe
Article 140
“How Nickelodeon Created Its Slime-Drenched ’90s Style
Thanks to its bright colors, clashing patterns, and a whole mess of green stuff, identifying with Nickelodeon was so easy because kids could so easily identify Nickelodeon shows”
http://bit.ly/3mzXCSx
Article 139
“Typos, tricks and misprints
Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology”
http://bit.ly/3y5SlnQ
Article 138
“I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.”
http://bit.ly/3AvMTfO
Article 137
“If You Can’t Find a Spouse Who Supports Your Career, Stay Single”
http://bit.ly/3Aqw0TI
Article 136
““They stand quietly,” wrote Lightman, “but secretly they seethe with their anger. For they must watch measured that which should not be measured. They must watch the precise passage of minutes and decades. They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.””
http://bit.ly/2Sjiz7B
Article 135
“How an Ancient Kingdom Explains Today’s China-Korea Relations
The Goguryeo empire has been gone for centuries — but it still has a lingering impact on East Asian politics.”
https://bit.ly/34qCzaH
Article 134
“How a False Sense of Security, and a Little Secret Tea, Broke Down Taiwan’s COVID-19 Defenses”
https://bit.ly/3upDumw
Article 133
“An Archaeologist on the Railroad of Death
The 1950s Hollywood movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, about a Japanese POW camp during World War II, nearly contained a fascinating side story about a dedicated archaeologist prisoner. Hendrik Robert van Heekeren deserves the spotlight.”
http://bit.ly/3ooXMeq
Article 132
“A delivery driver’s tale
I gave my youth to this city
Wang Haijia, male, 42 years old, from Hebei, delivery driver”
https://bit.ly/3fmBG88
Article 131
“The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time”
http://bit.ly/3uE1Rhh
Article 130
“The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman”
https://bit.ly/3ob8zbZ
Article 129
“Learning to Forgive My Distant Father
I always knew my dad loved me. But he often seemed to love his music more”
https://bit.ly/3nWuUKf
Article 128
“Shostakovich’s symphony played by a starving orchestra
In the summer of 1942, Leningrad was starving. It had been under siege and bombardment by German forces for nearly a year. And yet an orchestra managed to perform a new symphony by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and broadcast it across the city.”
https://bbc.in/3gNCtBq
Article 127
“The Snack Shack Blues
On the illusions of class mobility”
http://bit.ly/3tG6BSV
Article 126
“Futurology: how a group of visionaries looked beyond the possible a century ago and predicted today’s world”
http://bit.ly/3dvDdsK
Article 125
“Officially, India Has the World’s Second-Worst COVID-19 Outbreak. Unofficially, It’s Almost Certainly the Worst”
https://bit.ly/2RJRud6
Article 124
“Yuri Gagarin’s boomerang: the tale of the first person to return from space, and his brief encounter with Aussie culture”
http://bit.ly/3mF1pvS
Article 123
“The harmful ableist language you unknowingly use
Some of our most common, ingrained expressions have damaging effects on millions of people – and many of us don’t know we’re hurting others when we speak.”
https://bbc.in/3mz39qx
Article 122
“The Dig
The Keeladi excavations may alter the world’s ideas about the earliest Indians. But progress hasn’t been smooth for one of the country’s most sensational archaeological projects.”
https://bit.ly/3cKUihW
Article 121
“The student and the algorithm: how the exam results fiasco threatened one pupil’s future
Josiah Elleston-Burrell had done everything to make his dream of studying architecture a reality. But, suddenly, in the summer of 2020, he found his fate was no longer in his hands”
http://bit.ly/38KaqxZ
Article 120
“The triumph of bedroom pop
From Joe Meek to Taylor Swift: a short history of lo-fi”
http://bit.ly/2OqQNEp
Article 119
“‘I’m the Doctor Who Is Here to Help You Die’
Why do so many patients have to wait until they’re suffering terribly before they can get relief?”
http://bit.ly/3v4IePV
Article 118
“For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War IIIn 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taiga”
http://bit.ly/3qkCsWK
Article 117
“What Are Magazines Good For?”
http://bit.ly/3aQtbkS
Article 116
“Trump Hotel Employees Reveal What It Was Really Like Catering to the Right-Wing Elite
Four years’ worth of stories about VIP visits and grooming protocols, palm-greasing, rotten vegetables, and that time they lost Steve Mnuchin’s coat.”
http://bit.ly/3aMXSax
Article 115
“Ayahuasca: a psychedelic murder story
Did ayahuasca tea — brewed from rainforest plants and revered by many Brazilians as holy — contribute to the brutal death of a celebrated Brazilian artist?”
http://on.ft.com/3pyZVmP
Article 114
“The BBL is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world, despite the mounting number of deaths resulting from the procedure. What is driving its astonishing rise?”
http://bit.ly/3poR3zQ
Article 113
“How Being a Workaholic Differs from Working Long Hours — and Why That Matters for Your Health”
http://bit.ly/39MexdX
Article 112
“How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture
Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact.”
http://bit.ly/39oGurR
Article 111
“the common meal
On Taco Bell and belonging”
http://bit.ly/2LE38Ul
Article 110
“The rise and fall of the Zoom penis
New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin was allegedly caught masturbating during a company Zoom call. He’s not the first”
http://bit.ly/3stW39t
Article 109
“Unlocking the Mystery of Paris’ Most Secret Underground Society (combined)
On August 23, 2004, they discovered a cinema 60 feet beneath Paris.”
http://bit.ly/2LgSItB
Article 108
“VEGAS ON THE BLACK SEA
Gambling on change in Georgia’s most surreal city.”
http://bit.ly/2KMRnui
Article 107
“Were Neanderthals More Than Cousins to Homo Sapiens?
These members of the genus Homo have long occupied two different branches on the family tree. But now that researchers think these groups interbred, scholars are giving serious consideration to whether we are the same species after all.”
http://bit.ly/3mVtvBp
Article 106
“My Experiments with Matrimony
My matrimonial journey started on the same day I hit 27. That’s the autumn-age of life, not just because it’s beautiful, but also, that’s when your hair starts falling just like the leaves. On the first day of my autumn, my parents tried to surprise me by setting up a matrimonial profile as a birthday gift.”
https://bit.ly/3a7BkkL
Article 105
“Over the last forty years, academics have tried, without much success, to superimpose the idea of the Vikings as peaceful traders on the berserkers-and-horned-helmets tradition.”
https://bit.ly/36jZ2XH
Article 104
“Virtual Influencers Make Real Money While Covid Locks Down Human Stars
The pandemic isn’t a problem when you’re computer-generated.”
https://bloom.bg/3kMoECn
Article 103
“The Stages of Gentrification, as Told by Restaurant Openings
Data from city restaurant inspections, rental prices, and census figures, show how restaurants and gentrification are interconnected”
https://bit.ly/3e4bwG4
Article 102
“A Critic for All Seasons
What would restaurant criticism look like if it represented diners like me?”
https://bit.ly/2H4CVLW
Article 101
“Was Ramesses II really that great?
Emma Slattery Williams considers whether the fêted pharaoh – master builder, war hero and peace broker – was actually a brilliant propagandist who knew how to curate his image”
https://bit.ly/3nIkg9D
Article 100
“Braving the goblet of fire
Nick Cohen salutes J.K. Rowling, whose latest work reflects her refusal to take the easy route”
https://bit.ly/3l023Sz
Article 99
“mow the tiles
Moving into life lessons”
https://bit.ly/2FlsO4L
Article 98
“Marmalade: A Very British Obsession
Captain Scott took jars to the Antarctic with him, and Edmund Hillary took one up Everest. Marmalade is part of the British national myth. Livvy Potts wants to know why.”
https://bit.ly/2EITxHD
Article 97
“Now More So Than Ever
It’s not exactly a fun time to start a magazine, nor is it a convenient one. A magazine is by definition an optimistic, social project, and the past few months have found young people fairly hopeless and dramatically isolated—alienated all over again by an undemocratic political system and a hollowed out, dysfunctional government.”
https://bit.ly/3aZvujS
Article 96
“The Unbearable: Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic”
https://bit.ly/34hHXxX
Article 95
“What Milk-Sharing Communities Reveal
As women in the United States create networks to give or receive breast milk, anthropologists are illuminating the complex social and cultural forces that shape mothers’ choices.”
https://bit.ly/3242Da4
Article 94
“How Aztecs told history
For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices”
https://bit.ly/2Yf6csV
Article 93
“Celebrity Culture Is Burning
So when Pharrell Williams asked his followers to donate to aid frontline responders, they virtually grabbed him by the pants and shook him upside-down, telling him to empty his own deep pockets.”
https://nyti.ms/2PUee5R
Article 92
“The Strange Saga of Kowloon Walled City Anarchic, organic, surreal, this enclave was once among the most densely populated places on Earth.”
https://bit.ly/2BV9fi7
Article 91
Why good teachers allow a child’s mind to wander and wonder.
https://bit.ly/3hYd2ur
Article 90
“The Things We Can’t Control Are Beautiful
How Maria Konnikova found enlightenment at the poker table.”
https://bit.ly/3fcTukf
Article 89
“Not Your Server
A tech company touts “inclusion,” while facing accusations of caste bias in the workplace”
https://bit.ly/2Ederyp
Article 88
“With dismay, I will watch as Americans express their willingness to forfeit their civil liberties in the name of new surveillance measures, violating Ben Franklin’s grievously forgotten saying, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” “
https://bit.ly/3hkawOO
Article 87
“Tearing Down Statues Won’t Undo History
From the Berlin Wall to Confederate monuments, destroying a historic marker means destroying a learning opportunity.”
https://bit.ly/3iGQEH5
Article 86
“The fascinating objects of fascism
Roger Moorhouse shows it’s possible to treat modern history properly and in context”
https://bit.ly/2CVFmhN
Article 85
“The War on Coffee
The history of caffeine and capitalism can get surprisingly heated.”
https://bit.ly/3idOi29
Article 84
“Until recently, scientists and collectors had captured fewer than a hundred specimens of the earless monitor lizard, Lanthanotus borneensis, since the species’ 1877 discovery. Among reptile enthusiasts, its rarity and mystique have earned it a grandiose nickname: “the Holy Grail of herpetology.””
https://bit.ly/2NbWnWH
Article 83
“How Elders Make Us Human.
An anthropologist responds to the suggestion that older people sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
https://bit.ly/2Bbr5fV
Article 82
Article shared by Barack Obama on 10th June.
“Quarantine has changed us — and it’s not all bad
Here are 8 new habits people want to keep post-lockdown.”
https://bit.ly/2MLA8Xs
Article 81
“Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
How massive parallelism lifts the brain’s performance above that of AI.”
https://bit.ly/2MvRJCM
Article 80
“There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.”
https://bit.ly/2ysFtzv
Article 79
The disturbing return of scientific racism
Angela Saini’s Superior charts the rise of race science that’s being enabled by technology and genetics research. Discover the worrying new trend in this extract”
https://bit.ly/2zbdd4B
Article 78
“If the desire to procreate is one of the most powerful of human urges, so too is the desire to know our own identity. In the complex calculus of reproductive medicine, the achievement of a baby is considered the end–a success–when in fact it’s just the beginning. Long-term scientifically controlled studies on the psychological and emotional effects of donor conception have not been conducted.”
https://bit.ly/3dHFyOG
Article 77
“It was a time when male behavior on Wall Street was particularly noxious. “Women started getting jobs … and men did everything they could to make them feel like they didn’t belong,” says Susan Antilla, author of Tales From the Boom-Boom Room, a history of women in banking. That meant parades of strippers in the office, Playboy centerfolds hung up at the desks, care packages for female employees containing dildos or calzones shaped like penises. It could also mean verbal abuse or sexual assault.”
https://bit.ly/2yBp5wJ
Article 76
“In an increasingly urbanized world, few people still ride horses for reasons beyond sport or leisure. However, on horseback, people, goods, and ideas moved across vast distances, shaping the power structures and social systems of the premechanized era. From the trade routes of the Silk Road or the great Mongol Empire to the equestrian nations of the American Great Plains, horses were the engines of the ancient world.
Where, when, and how did humans first domesticate horses?”
https://bit.ly/2WB3ufS
Article 75
“Panama disease, an infection that ravages banana plants, has been sweeping across Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. The impact has been devastating. In the Philippines alone, losses have totalled US$400m. And the disease threatens not only the livelihoods of everyone in this US$44 billion industry but also the 400m people in developing countries who depend on bananas for a substantial proportion of their calorie intake.”
https://bit.ly/2KVQA6H
Article 74
“The Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death was formed in 1968. Deliberating in private, the 13 men – 10 doctors, one lawyer, one historian and one theologian – put all the stakes on the brain, deciding that those who have a heartbeat and breath (even if machine-controlled) could still be considered dead. Six months later, without public discussion or fanfare, they had produced ‘brain death’, a new category of knowledge and being that would upend everything anyone knew about the end of human life. “
https://bit.ly/2ybhvsw
Article 73
“This is no less bonkers and a lot more good-hearted than the five talks I’ve just sat through where people in suits declared, and I am barely paraphrasing, that bitcoin will go up forever, taking everyone in the room with it until we leave this mortal plane and ascend into the ionosphere where ICOs rain chocolate money and there is no death.”
https://bit.ly/2KG52j8
Article 72
“My grandfather designed a house that reflected the modernist sensibilities of his time: glass-and-cinder-block exterior, stained-wood walls, and a fireplace mosaic depicting the developmental life cycle of the honeybee. The living room was open, and two towering walls of books there told the story of one generation’s liberated secularism—Richard Feynman, Alfred Kinsey, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, and the art of Native American tribes. In time, my grandparents raised three boys, grew marijuana on their roof, and went to see the Mamas and the Papas sing in Monterey.”
https://bit.ly/356v7RQ
Article 71
“When she picked up her grandmother from a nearby mobile park, the morning sky had turned dark; the street ahead of her was illuminated orange and red by the flames lining the road and the brake lights of gridlocked cars. She was one of thousands fleeing Paradise, California, as the Camp Fire consumed acres by the minute. It would later be recognized as the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in modern California history.”
https://bit.ly/2yb1TVb
Article 70
“IN NEW YORK CITY AND throughout the country, the professional-managerial class is hunkered down and making the best of a bad situation: working remotely, enjoying time with their families, making sure their children stay up on their schoolwork, finding ways to work out, exercising self-care, and catching up on all the shows they’ve wanted to binge-watch. This could be told as a story about the wonders of technology and capitalism. Social media, communication platforms, delivery services, and streaming entertainment make life under quarantine more bearable and productive. But such a narrative would miss the main story.”
https://bit.ly/2JQcwiT
Article 69
“What does a writer do when his words stop working? I don’t know. All I know is that I am churning inside and everything I knew is windskipping like brown willow leaves in a winter gale. I am afraid and sometimes I am excited. I feel like something is waiting for me, and I don’t know what, but I fear that I do know, I fear that I am being called, and I am taking too long to answer. But who is to say how long it should take?”
https://bit.ly/39AYoEM
Article 68
“This Indian TikTok star wants you to know his name. Two years ago Israil Ansari was working as a handyman and didn’t even own a smartphone. Then things started to go crazy”
https://bit.ly/2QVThZ6
Article 67
““If you’re gonna mute yourself and not show video, why are you here, bro?” the host scolds about a dozen people on the call. In the chat running down the side of the screen, teenagers who do not know each other are amicably exchanging Snapchat handles and attempting to break off into cliques. Someone writes, of course, “I’m tryna see some titties,” to which someone says out loud, “Oh my god, who the hell said I’m tryna see some titties.” The host starts playing one of Kanye West’s songs about Jesus, and everyone starts yelling in irritation. Someone spills White Claw on their laptop. The flashing red circle that indicates that someone is recording the call starts flashing, and everyone yells again.”
https://bit.ly/2vZ1CUS
Article 66
“The downside is, of course, that this would give legitimacy to a terrifying new surveillance system. If you know, for example, that I clicked on a Fox News link rather than a CNN link, that can teach you something about my political views and perhaps even my personality. But if you can monitor what happens to my body temperature, blood pressure and heart-rate as I watch the video clip, you can learn what makes me laugh, what makes me cry, and what makes me really, really angry.”
https://on.ft.com/2JiiqZM
Article 65
Super interesting, super well written, super long read. Must read.
“I looked through the window to see whether the men inside were mean. I had this suspicion that I could tell by looking at them, which is how you can tell if men are mean in the movies. But in real life men can behave very well for a while and then suddenly hurt you and then behave well again. I knew this but was ignoring it. I had rent to pay. I got in the car and eyed the locks, checked the door handles, considered my escape.”
https://bit.ly/2WFzq4g
Article 64
“Two countries, thousands of families, and a 16-year quest to identify a silent man in a bed”
http://bit.ly/2QlO5h0
Article 63
“History’s largest mining operation is about to begin. It’s underwater—and the consequences are unimaginable.
Mining companies want access to the seabed beneath international waters, which contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined.”
http://bit.ly/2IRd5sc
Article 62
“On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, “lacked a single foreigner or negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion.”
http://bit.ly/2INofyo
Article 61
“The goal of the torturers was to vent sufficient emotional fury to avenge their dead kin while simultaneously restraining themselves from killing the captive until the appropriate moment dictated by Indian spiritual beliefs. Indians sometimes treated their captives with meticulous politeness throughout the long ordeal of their execution. A Huron explained to a French missionary: ‘We have nothing but caresses for them a day before their death, even when our minds are filled with cruelties, the severity of which we afterward find all our pleasure in making them feel.’ Such decorum was in keeping with the significance that Indians attached to the rituals of torture and execution.”
http://bit.ly/2vQcunU
Article 60
“Today, China uses almost half the world’s concrete. The property sector – roads, bridges, railways, urban development and other cement-and-steel projects – accounted for a third of its economy’s expansion in 2017. Every major city has a floor-sized scale model of urban development plans that has to be constantly updated as small white plastic models are turned into mega-malls, housing complexes and concrete towers.”
http://bit.ly/2VvFBYa
Article 59
“Monogamy was coupled with the idea that only a married woman was eligible to bear children. Many women were unable to find husbands from among the limited ranks of men with farm land. They too remained on the family farm as unmarried dependents or sought their fortunes in the town or in domestic service on the estates of the nobility. Legitimacy laws rendered the children of unmarried women without legal rights to a livelihood at all. Indeed, a punitive stance against illegitimate children and their mothers provided incentives for single and hence ineligible women not to have children.”
http://bit.ly/2uYmb3b
Article 58
““Did you read about what happened in Kashmir?” they’d say to each other on a day like February 14, 2019, when a suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives into a group of Indian Army convoys. They’d pause and ponder, dipping biscuits into chai and then comment from afar — in the air of faux expertise — on the details of a mysterious region that seems, these days (and perhaps, one could argue, since its inception) to only exist in the news. Then, after a few moments of discussion, they’d transition into more neutral territory, like the weather in Gujarat, before any great disagreements broke out.”
http://bit.ly/2SC5ti0
Article 57
Ruan itself might come from an ancient Chinese state of the same name, or maybe from the ancient lute-like instrument also called a ruan. Who knows? Either way, it seems likely that some mid-level Chinese bureaucrat, in seeking to figure out who actually lived in his newly conquered Vietnamese territory, simply decided that everyone living there would also be named Ruan—which became Nguyen.”
http://bit.ly/36EaJqf
Article 56
“A picture that comprises figure and ground requires an enclosed field. Without an enclosure, the space around its figure(s) will not necessarily read as part of the picture; enclosure is, therefore, the originary act that gives rise to the picture but also limits it. Nothing says this enclosure needs to take the shape of a rectangle, but the history of Western art, at least, makes the rectangle look like a virtually inescapable anatomical limit.”
http://bit.ly/2t2rcXn
Article 55
“I used to read stories about men like him and they are heroes to me. Clearly her grandfather is a hero to her as well, and she is going to make him quite proud. This connection with a WWII vet through his amazing granddaughter is a gift. One of many I receive on an almost daily basis in this amazing institution. I think it’s worth taking a moment here and acknowledging that this thing we now call “PTSD” has always been around. Some of us veterans escape it while others, like me and likely this gent in the airplane, felt the sting of it.”
http://bit.ly/39L4R17
Article 54
“Between 30 and 45 paparazzi work Britney on any given night. The expensive cars they drive reflect the fact that Britney Spears—her marriages, custody battles, fights with her mom, new boyfriends, Starbucks runs, trips to the hospital—is a bigger and more lucrative story than Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton or John Lennon and Yoko Ono. History’s best-publicized celebrity meltdown has helped fuel dozens of television shows, magazines, and Internet sites, the combined value of whose Britney-related product easily exceeds $100 million a year, and helped make Britney Spears the most popular search term on Yahoo once again in 2007, as it has been for six of the past seven years.”
http://bit.ly/37ay2IK
Article 53
“AAA estimates that forty-nine million Americans will be traveling at least fifty miles by car to Thanksgiving this year, while Airlines for America anticipates thirty-one million will fly between November 22 and December 3. The environmental impact will be brutal, and the stress of handling all those irate passengers is a heavy burden for airport workers. Some mayhem is expected, but thanks to the labor of always overworked and frequently underpaid transportation workers, most travelers make it home in time for turkey.”
http://bit.ly/2P8to6U
Article 52
“Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment—Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.”
http://bit.ly/35iNl10
Article 51
“On December 1, 2009, to commemorate World aids Day, Twitter announced a promotion: if users employed the hashtag #red, their tweets would appear highlighted in red. Megan Phelps-Roper, a twenty-three-year-old legal assistant, seized the opportunity. “Thank God for aids!” she tweeted that morning. “You won’t repent of your rebellion that brought His wrath on you in this incurable scourge, so expect more & worse! #red.””
http://bit.ly/2Qzzr6I
Article 50
“Gerald Blanchard could hack any bank, swipe any jewel. There was no security system he couldn’t beat.” http://bit.ly/2WX4PgC
Article 49 “The first lesson was this: Always start at the bottom, then cast your eyes upward in search of the unfolding story. This became, for a time, my preferred way of investigating the world around me. A boat was measured first by its barnacles, and a person by their shoes. In Petersburg, where I grew up, commercial fisherman like my uncles and my grandpa all wore the same brown xtratuf boots. In the jail where my father lived, everyone except the guards wore cheap slip-ons with thin soles. My grandmother, whose feet were badly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, could only wear sandals;”
http://bit.ly/2JVe77r
Article 48
“He is a man without a country, a family and a home. For more than a decade, Merhan Nasseri has been living in terminal one at Charles de Gaulle airport, waiting. For what, he doesn’t know anymore”
http://bit.ly/2NHNc0i
Article 47
“Luckier performers have made a success out of flouting conventional morality. In a notorious appearance on Late Night with David Letterman 1994, Madonna (whom Letterman introduced by dryly observing that she had “slept with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry”) smoked a cigar and said “fuck” 13 times. Letterman faux-innocently asked, “You realize this is being broadcast, don’t you?””
http://bit.ly/31Y3GWS
Article 46
“With all these piercings in their bodies and the kavadi on their shoulders, devotees walk for the better part of the day under the tropical sun until they reach the temple. This walk is done either barefooted on the scorching asphalt or in shoes made of upright nails. When they finally reach their destination, the pilgrims must carry their heavy burden (often weighting over 100 pounds) up 242 steps to where the temple is located. This remarkable tradition is performed by millions of Hindus around the world each year, including in Mauritius.”
http://bit.ly/2MMvbgD
Article 45
“At its heart, laughter is a tool to triumph over fear. As we grow older, our senses of humor become more demanding and refined, but that basic, hard-wired reflex remains. We need it, because life is scary. Nature is heartless, people can be cruel, and death and suffering are inevitable and arbitrary. We learn to tame our terror by laughing at the absurdity of it all.”
https://wapo.st/2pk0ibc
Article 44
“In any minority group, the most prominent members are expected to somehow speak for the entire constituency. But, if the burden of being Constance Wu seemed to weigh heavily, it was also evidently not something that she felt she could renounce. The day of the “Simple Man” makeup session, we wandered the scruffy beachfront of Kaiaka Bay, picking our way through cow bush and sugarcane ferns to the water’s edge.”
http://bit.ly/33aTgnP
Article 43
“This view informed René Descartes, who in the 17th century situated the soul (for him, the mind) precisely in this tiny mid-brain structure, which he imagined to be something of a thought valve; he called it ‘the seat of the soul’.”
http://bit.ly/333yKW8
Article 42
“A blood clot had formed in a part of their son’s brain stem called the pons, causing a stroke right at the juncture where his body met his mind. Erik was suffering from an extremely rare and permanent condition known as locked-in syndrome. “Bottom line is that he has no control over any of his muscles,” the doctor told them. “He’ll never move and he’ll never speak.” Otherwise, the accident had spared virtually all of Erik’s conscious and unconscious processing systems. His memory, his reason, and his emotions were all intact. He could see and hear and feel–and feel pain–but he would never again have any way of communicating.”
http://bit.ly/2lJWOgO
Article 41
“Not everything he says is true, not everything he says is false,” says Biella Coleman. Auernheimer deploys a peculiar rhetorical strategy that he’s learned to work to his advantage: he peppers his conversation with bizarre but true facts and historical references—he has an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Greek history, world religions and contemporary U.S. anti-government extremists, among other things—then hits you with dubious details about his own life. The idea is that the overwhelming strangeness of the world will make you more receptive to the relatively banal stuff Auernheimer makes up about himself.
http://bit.ly/2lHSA9x
Article 40
“Would you like bottle service at one of our dance-floor tables? That’ll be another $10,000. How about a 30-liter bottle of champagne to share with a dozen women you’ve never met? $250,000. How about we get Kim Kardashian to come? $100,000. Devin Friedman explores the world, adds it all up, and explains the mysteries and the pitfalls of the hottest club on the planet.”
http://bit.ly/2keXCd2
Article 39
“In truth, I was on the fence. Children felt like both a way to jump-start my real life and a way to end it. I wasn’t afraid of being a mother, and I didn’t think I’d be a bad one. I just wanted to be other things so much more. As a journalist, my days rarely followed a nine-to-five schedule. I found purpose in my work and couldn’t imagine rearranging my days to include breastfeeding and diaper changes. I knew it was possible to be a mother while maintaining a career, but I had little desire to take on the challenge. I didn’t see children as a punishment or a burden. But I also did not see them as a gift.”
http://bit.ly/2kyoFA5
Article 38
“Evolution is a nice, big idea. It connotes the glacial pace of an unmeditated act unfolding upon species, concepts, and ecosystems. It certainly doesn’t usually get branded as a feeling. But a couple months ago I felt this thing. Maybe a little like what a mommy feels when her fetus kicks the wall crossed with how the baby feels when it gets its pre-K diploma, and the best word I can come up with for it is evolution. Not the glacial kind, but the real-time, Matrix-flavored kind. I was too busy barreling through the wicked pipe of a 30-milligram Adderall to think about it much when it happened, though.”
http://bit.ly/2lCZWKV
Article 37
““Indians don’t ‘fall,’ Debie. We don’t marry by accident. We choose. Choose to marry, choose to love. We’re not powerless like Americans.”
Even in cases where the falling is inconvenient—because it happens too early, or too late, or between lovers whose lives are too messy to bode well for their futures—even in those cases, the falling itself is respected as a legitimate experience, entirely within the realm of the human and the normal.”
http://bit.ly/2UnyFJP
Article 36
The following is a brilliant article from Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic from 2006.
“I was to understand that it was the way of domestic workers to fall short of money, and the obligation of householders to get them out of scrapes. I came to appreciate that the various trials of the employee’s life were very much my business, that ours was inherently an association of unequals, and that decency demanded that I keep that uppermost in my mind and behave accordingly.”
http://bit.ly/2zmYr7B
Article 35
“Nothing pulls at the imagination like extremes – overwrought banquets and orgies, epic battles, devastating natural disasters, glorious human triumphs. Our omnivorous appetites find extravagant feasts awe-inspiring and enviable, and occasionally disconcerting.”
http://bit.ly/31nzchi
Article 34
“Immediately, as if drawn by the call of the Sirens, many of Delphine’s 4.1 million followers flocked to her newly established store, where her so-called “Gamer Girl Bathwater,” which she sold for $30 per jar, sold out instantly. The story went viral, with media outlets alternately deriding Delphine’s fans for their naïvete and applauding her for her marketing savvy;
In truth, though, Delphine’s success is not all that surprising — the only thing the internet loves more than a hot, half-naked gamer girl, is a hot, half-naked gamer girl who’s expert at trolling.”
http://bit.ly/2ywQFrj
Article 33
“Perhaps it is that same search for cosmopolitan virtue that still drives the droves of us, the Erasmus kids hastily spending bureaucrat stipends on wine and metro tickets, the Iranian post-docs gazing at stars in newly-built astronomy labs, to here, year after year. In spite of the ever-greater ticking of rent prices and the fact that the Champs-Élysées is now roughly 75% luxury chain stores and two-story McDonald’s franchises, Paris retains a mystique that resists disillusion down to its very essence.”
http://bit.ly/2GOUVaf
Article 32
“Microbes are everywhere, but we take their presence on phones, keyboards, and toilet seats as a sign of filth and squalor. They fill our bodies, helping us to digest our food and safeguard our health, but we view them as adversaries to be drugged and conquered.”
http://bit.ly/2GAavWV
Article 31
“Among the dismantled rigs, lifeless pyrotechnics, and bowed heads of Burners absorbed in cleaning, we are here trying to answer a simple question: How, after so many years, could Burning Man throw an event of such chaos, and yet leave the desert without a trace? What leads thousands of people in such an extreme environment to consistently engage in cooperative behavior at a scale seldom seen in society?”
http://bit.ly/2YoKVdw
Article 30
“He says that a “failure to teach the growing child age-appropriate limits” produces a child who is “self-centered and immature, unable to delay gratification or to tolerate not having his or her way.” Such a child sees all her wants as needs, and reacts to unmet needs by way of a display of outrage (the temper tantrum). McIntosh notes that hardships such as divorce, family strife and mental disorders (on the part of either child or parent) make such behavior more likely;”
http://bit.ly/2Y9aovy
Article 29
“It was only 100 years ago, after all, that scientists first invented the “intelligence quotient” to measure someone’s intellectual potential. Their success relies on the fact that many cognitive abilities are correlated. So your ability to perform spatial reasoning or pattern recognition is linked to your maths ability and your verbal prowess, and so on. For this reason, IQ is thought to reflect a “general intelligence” – a kind of underlying brainpower.”
https://bbc.in/30CSCyo
Article 28
“Today’s post is different. This is a link, not to an article, but for a wonderful podcast. This was a beautiful, eye opening and thorough listen. Talks about human beliefs, belief change and cognitive dissonance.
In this episode we explore new research that suggests for the majority of the mind change we experience, after we update our priors, we delete what we used to believe and then simply forget that we ever thought otherwise.”
http://bit.ly/2LXl6il
Article 27
Studying Earth’s global biosphere together, Margulis and Lovelock realized that it has some of the properties of a life form. It seems to display “homeostasis,” or self‐regulation. Many of Earth’s life‐sustaining qualities exhibit remarkable stability. The temperature range of the climate; the oxygen content of the atmosphere; the pH, chemistry, and salinity of the ocean—all these are biologically mediated. All have, for hundreds of millions of years, stayed within a range where life can thrive.
http://bit.ly/2XXuxo4
Article 26
There is that — the incremental forward movement on the toes that, if prolonged for any length of time, always elicits ecstatic applause from the audience. But there is the added image, central to ballet, of the female dancer posed on her toes with the support of the male consort who is then turned, fast or slow, in pirouette — a perfect doll-like figure displayed dramatically for the male gaze (To appropriate the phrase used most commonly in critique of classic narrative film).
http://bit.ly/2KK19vu
Article 25
I am now 68 years of age but when I was 21, in my final year at university, I became aware of major problems then facing the world – war, poverty, acid rain, ozone depletion, desertification, deforestation, species loss, civil and military uses and abuses of nuclear power, pollution, population growth, consumerism and the climate crisis. I was determined to devote my life to helping solve these problems.
http://bit.ly/2LklEhK
Article 24
Before my job, when people would ask me what I did and I’d tell them I was a writer, I felt like a fraud. The reality of freelancing is often waiting months for cheques and payments to arrive. It means knowing that one month you’ll be in demand, and the next month your inbox could be empty. The ebb and flow of the job left me too scared to even call myself a writer out loud to other people. Yes, I had been published—but that didn’t mean I would continue being published or that the people who’d publish me would even have jobs in a month.
http://bit.ly/2IQKtPD
Article 23
Sontag’s own style was monstrous; inspiringly monstrous. We’re used to hearing this term ‘monster’ as an insult. But the monster – a figure of excess, difficult to absorb culturally – confronts us with the limits of our own powers, and forces us to rise to the level of what the text, or the time, demands from us.
http://bit.ly/2WM0osd
Article 22
“Small wonder that so many of us become at least mildly depressed, while others succumb to more serious forms of mental illness. The brutality of the journey also exacts its toll in more visible ways: I watched as certain of my colleagues gained or lost alarming amounts of weight in short periods. Graduate school is unkind to the body, a time of monastic restraint so vise-like and lasting, your inborn eagerness for touch can dwindle to what William Blake called the “shadow of Desire.””
http://bit.ly/2MFSsnH
Article 21
“What starts as an innocent article about nostalgia, becomes a fantastic thought provoking read!
“”Tom Vanderbilt opined about the ever-shrinking “nostalgia gap,” and comically posited scenarios that might come true if this shrinking continued at its current dizzying speed: “The previous month’s Top 40 will appear in boxed-CD sets, as television commercials intone: ‘Do you remember what it was like in April, to be young and carefree, listening to the music that made you feel that way?’ Hey man, is that April Rock? Well, turn it up!”””
http://bit.ly/2Mp4Wjo
Article 20
“Homeless individuals present one of empathy’s most difficult tests. Acknowledging their experiences is painful; it induces guilt; it damages our sense that the world is just. Circumstances like these tip the balance in empathy’s tug-of-war, favoring avoidance.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.””
http://bit.ly/2YVuqGK
Article 19
Rapanui songs expressed “the surprise of being alive and also the sadness of life.”
http://bit.ly/2JwZx7x
Article 18
“The new motto says: “If you experience something — record it. If you record something — upload it. If you upload something — share it.””
https://on.ft.com/2W9ceLG
Article 17
“The reason dogs make good pets is in large part because they have this innate behavior of finding somewhere to sit and wait for food to arrive, which is exactly what our pet dogs do. Their niche is scavenging food from humans. They are like ravens and foxes that scavenge food from wolves or humans. Where is that dog food supply? Look for humans, and there it is. Why are dogs nice to people? They are the source of food. Dogs find some food source that arrives daily and they sit there and wait.”
http://bit.ly/2vUOht1
Article 16
“The only thing stopping you from listening to a podcast is you. Just plug in, pick the show, and play it: there’s no flipping through stations, no snatches of song or prayer, no scraps of news, and no chance you’ll settle on something without knowing what it is. There’s nothing intrusive, accidental, surprising — no static, no interference — and it’ll cut out all the other unwanted noise of life, too. An unbroken stream of sound, a stealth multitasking machine, the podcast has no natural predators.”
http://bit.ly/2VPvTjR
Article 15
Fantastic, long read about a cult/not a cult?? 🤔. Must read.
“If the word is living, then God is not dead, the Bible is unfinished, and a new day is coming. Stevens predicted that day would be in 1979, when his followers, through convulsive prayer and spiritual intensity, would lift him into heaven and he in turn would leave the gates wide open, granting the faithful “resurrection life”: immortality.”
http://bit.ly/2Vl7jry
Article 14
“In short, humanists have spent centuries acquiring a distinctive interpretive expertise, and they are right to feel that research on cultural history would be more meaningful if it were built on that foundation. But there is, alas, another side to this story, less likely to be popular in history and English departments. While scientists usually do a better job if they work in collaboration with humanists, it must be admitted that today they can often make genuine contributions to historical understanding with or without our assistance.”
http://bit.ly/2ZXb8C8
Article 13
“In a fairly undisguised etymology, the word “influence” comes from the Latin for “inflow,” which provides an image of the way that, every second, our thoughts now stream into one another’s pockets. The same image evokes our anxieties about hostile foreign states penetrating our defenses. Influence is a challenge to sovereignty, both political and personal; to admit to being influenced is to give up the attractive idea that, as individuals or societies, we are entirely self-contained.”
http://bit.ly/2GY18j9
Article 12
“A gay, 31-year-old Brit with frosted hair, Yiannopoulos has been speaking at college campuses on his Dangerous Faggot tour. He says trolling is a direct response to being told by the left what not to say and what kinds of video games not to play. “Human nature has a need for mischief. We want to thumb our nose at authority and be individuals,” he says. “Trump might not win this election. I might not turn into the media figure I want to. But the space we’re making for others to be bolder in their speech is some of the most important work being done today. The trolls are the only people telling the truth.””
http://bit.ly/2VkUc9d
Article 11
“Apps take this consolation to a new, interactive level. When you swipe in Todoist, you experience a moment of resistance that the designers have intentionally added to generate “a fleeting sense of accomplishment.” Such features, Gregg argues, create an “aesthetics of activity” that makes the apps so appealing. If you can focus on checking items off a list (or adding them to a spreadsheet), you’re absolved from having to think about why you’re doing them.”
http://bit.ly/2vhkWbS
Article 10
“That film grossed over a billion at the box office, with its sequel – the culmination of over a decade of interconnected superhero cinema – on track to do even better. So you think I’d be hoping that those left standing would survive for another decade of adventures. But, actually, not so much. It’s going to hurt, but it’s time for them all to cop it. Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye. Especially Hawkeye.”
http://bit.ly/2VatiRl
Article 9
“Anthropologists have found that across diverse cultures, tattooing is a way to advertise or emphasize one’s identity. Tatau follows the pattern. “Tattooing is still something important in a man’s life or in a woman’s life in terms of marking their belonging to the community,” Galliot says.”
http://bit.ly/2DnEvnw
Article 8
““If you’re spending all your time as a Twitch broadcaster or creating memes, that is work,” says John Ahlquist, an associate professor at the University of San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, who has done research on the changing nature of work. “People that are trying to earn a living on these platforms are recognizing how vulnerable they are on an individual basis with respect to the platform, and so they’re turning to this tried-and-true model of collective action.””
http://bit.ly/2XoHhQG
Article 7
“Eighty percent of women living in communist East Germany always reached orgasm during sex, according to the Hamburg magazine Neue Revue in 1990. For West German women that figure was only 63 percent. Those counterintuitive findings confirmed two earlier studies, which East German sex researchers had published in 1984 and 1988. Those had found East German women reported high levels of sexual satisfaction outpacing those in the West.”
http://bit.ly/2DicwVX
Article 6
Wonderful writeup of an ethnomusicologist, about his long winded struggle to understand why some parts of Kenyan drumming was incomprehensible to his White brain, in spite of being reasonably adept at the art form. Very engaging article. Must Read.
http://bit.ly/2Z3NVNX
Article 5
“But as I went through one failed relationship after another, falling in and out of lust and love with various men whom I had ascertained to be my soul mates, I began to question my concept of true love. I began to recognize the gradual fade of fiery passion in the early days of a relationship, replaced by a sort of complacent companionship a few years in, where I would find myself disproportionately upset about socks left on the floor and remnants of beard shavings around the sink.”
http://bit.ly/2U8KTEr
Article 4
“Norwegian black metal, though, is inseparable from its history. This month sees the release of Lords of Chaos, director Jonas Åkerlund’s intense dramatisation of events, focusing on the friendship and fatal rift between Aarseth (played by Rory Culkin) and Vikernes (Emory Cohen). It is bruising and brutal – when it screened at the London film festival last November, a man vomited, a woman fainted and an ambulance was summoned.”
http://bit.ly/2WOkWMf
Article 3
“I suspect some degree of fatness has been present in all human societies, except for those on the brink of survival or living in truly extreme environments. I suspect that obese people have been sometimes revered, sometimes reviled, and perhaps sometimes just accepted without shame. But recent ethnographic research in Fiji and elsewhere strongly suggests that cultural attitudes toward fatness are less diverse now than they were in the past.”
http://bit.ly/2WrSvU7
Article 2
“Reading the engaging and well-told life story of a First Lady, then, cannot but feel a bit like reading an obituary. This is particularly true when the woman is Michelle Obama, a woman who undoubtedly had potential that could not be realized within the constraints of the choices she made. Feeling this way is less a feminist preference for one set of choices for another, and more of an exposition of how the gendered arrangements of President and First Lady, East and West Wing, impose suffocating constraints on the women who occupy this role.”
http://bit.ly/2OtfFGP
Article 1
“All of the scents blend together into something barely noticeable, with the occasional whiff of something delicious. We each live in a world of scents that go unnoticed in the backgrounds of our lives; they hum at the edges of our ability to perceive them. It can be a “big blur,” says Christophe Laudamiel, a French master perfumer who is based in New York and Berlin. It doesn’t have to be. “If you are trained, if you are an expert, you can discern things in the noise that you don’t discern if you haven’t practiced before.””
http://bit.ly/2Foasw8
Curated Reading list for CAT – Politics/Law/Crime | 2
This post contains loads of articles categorised under Politics, Law and Crime. These are handpicked articles over the course of years for CAT Aspirants. This is the second of 2 posts. Click on the following link to go to the previous post: LINK here.
Every Article will have blurb, either written by me or an extract from the original post (mostly the latter) followed by the link to reach the article.
Article 151
The rise and fall of the Soviet Empire II: Why russia’s “Twilight War” in Ukraine will be its last
Article 150
A raft of evidence shows that caste discrimination has been imported from India to the United States.
Article 149
Leaders try to fix every problem — like poverty and education — but end up getting nothing done
Article 148
Far from demanding accountability from Qatar, South Asian governments have often been mute spectators to the plight of workers and their families at home.
Article 147
Farmer suicide numbers have fallen not because of policies to ease their plight, but due to a ban on the kind of pesticides, they consumed to end their lives.
Article 146
On a remote island in Maine, a group of friends thought they witnessed one man killing another with an axe. But no one was ever arrested. In a small town far out at sea, justice sometimes works a little differently.
Article 145
A growing mortality gap between Republican and Democratic areas may largely stem from
Article 144
As the pandemic rages across the country, one team of fact-checkers contends with a post-truth dystopia.
Article 143
Newly revealed Vatican documents uncover a long-held secret: As war broke out, Pius XII used a Nazi prince to negotiate with Adolf Hitler.
Article 142
By enacting simple laws that make guns safer and harder to get, we can prevent killings like the ones in Uvalde and Buffalo
Article 141
The ‘disturbed areas’ and ‘illegal migrants’ of today’s India were yesterday’s ‘scheduled districts’ and ‘criminal tribes.’ The line between the past and present is straighter than you think.
Article 140
Leaked draft of Supreme Court ruling signals a seismic shift in American politics and law.
Article 139
Will ‘Russia’s Google’ turn into ‘Russia’s Tencent’?
Yandex, the country’s biggest tech company, could look at India for growth.
Article 138
“A Long Road to Nowhere: 10 Years of the Kim Jong Un Regime
In April, Kim Jong Un will mark the 10th anniversary of his complete succession to power. He doesn’t have much to celebrate.”
Article 137
ever Again
Warriors live by an honor code. What the Russian military is doing in Ukraine are barbaric war crimes committed by soulless savages. It is time to put an end to this.”
Article 136
“The Foreigner
An Assam Border Police official and ex-serviceman, Mohammed Sanaullah was the model Indian citizen. Then his employers decided he wasn’t.”
Article 135
“Smashed
How Prohibition came to Andhra Pradesh, and how it’s going.”
Article 134
“No One Has Addressed WHY Russia Invaded Ukraine (So I’ll Do It)
There are bigger reasons at play than an insane madman flexing p
Article 133
“High crimes and cabals
The official definition of corruption – the abuse of public office for private gain – does little to capture the reality”
Article 132
“The Economic cost of a Russia-Ukraine war”
Article 131
“Francis Fukuyama: Will We Ever Get Beyond The Nation-State?
In the face of planetary challenges, the nation-state is both the problem and the solution, says the Stanford scholar.”
Article 130
“Who would benefit from the Russia-Ukraine war?”
Article 129
“The 20th-Century History Behind Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
During WWII, Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazis as liberators from Soviet oppression. Now, Russia is using that chapter to paint Ukraine as a Nazi nation”
Article 128
“Those born later
In 1985 West Germany’s president gave an unflinching speech. It helped a new generation to face the Nazi past honestly”
Article 127
“Doctor Who
He was a doctor on a tea estate in Assam. He studied at a prestigious college. Like thousands of other medical professionals in rural India, he was also not the person he claimed to be.”
Article 126
“Punjabi men abandoned by their NRI wives don’t have law or officials on their side. They lose their marriage, money, and Canada dreams.”
Article 125
“When children didn’t follow orders or learn quickly enough, their teacher would put them into a stress position they call “the motorcycle,” the children say. Aysu and Lütfullah demonstrate: two arms stretched out front, knees bent in a half-squat, which they held for several minutes.”
Article 124
“Gary Hersham has been selling houses to the very rich for decades. At first, £1m was a big deal. Now he sells for £50m, £100m, even £200m. What does it take to stay on top in this cut-throat business?”
Article 123
“Ajmer gangrape and blackmail case was a toxic mix of political patronage, religious reach, impunity, and small-town glamour. Thirty years on, closure still seems far.”
Article 122
“Amazon has amassed a vast amount of sensitive personal information on its customers. Internal documents reveal how a former aide to Joe Biden helped the tech giant build a lobbying juggernaut that has gutted legislation in two dozen states seeking to give consumers more control over their data.”
Article 121
Analysis: Racist labour exploitation continues in multicultural Canada.
Article 120
“How do you convince truckers to work when their pay isn’t guaranteed, even to the point where they lose money?”
Article 119
“Pavin Chachavalpongpun on the Strange Death of King Ananda Mahidol”
https://bit.ly/3HSNPyc
Article 118
“Anonymous users generate most toxic abuse and conspiracy theories online. The right to be anonymous should be curtailed”
Article 117
“Though small, this study is the only one of its kind in India that explores the barriers that women with disabilities encounter while accessing abortions and other sexual and reproductive healthcare services. While the study focuses largely on physical barriers, there are other overarching information and attitudinal barriers that prevent women from accessing these facilities.”
https://bit.ly/3Fhgmwl
Article 116
“Democracies are no longer as worried as they once were about offending a fragile Beijing.”
https://bit.ly/3c4kinl
Article 115
“India has big plans for new nuclear power plants. What does it plan to do with the old ones?”
https://bit.ly/3nx7cVk
