You might think the extinction of all life on Earth is the worst-case scenario for our planet and for humanity. Unfortunately, it’s not even close.
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Give me 10 minutes and I’ll tell you why you’re living in Narnia.
For reasons difficult to discern, a lot of people hate Sam Harris. I am not one of those people. Sam Harris is brilliant, and his podcast is a tour de force.
Vinay Gupta is one of those humans who make you wish there were about 10,000 more humans exactly like him.
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.” ― Neil Gaiman As Mr. Gaiman cleverly suggests in the opening quote, the Internet is, like, a super-sea of information, and a whole lot of the information on the web is just . . . noise-content—i.e. irrelevant, undesired, vapid, and/or bite-sized content. In [...]
“For the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane.” ― Ludwig Feuerbach, 1843 Life on Earth in the twenty-first century is characterized by the near inability to avoid being constantly bombarded by images, [...]
Since the day you emerged into this bizarre, sparkling universe, you’ve been conditioned to think in certain ways. And that’s damn wonderful a lot of the time. It’s arguably a blessing that our minds learn to auto-dismiss certain notions—like, say, walking off of that cliff or stabbing Uncle Melvin with a butter knife—and auto-accept others. [...]
“Aren’t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?” David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and Other Essays is a rare sort of book—one which traverses boldly across numerous disciplines to dissect the dark underbelly of modern American culture, politics, and society. Published nearly 10 years ago, Wallace’s conscientious commentary remains utterly poignant today, and [...]
Crowdfunding is f***ing cool, and it’s changing the world. Unless you pulled a Rip Van Winkle the past few years, you know about crowdfunding. It’s that thing where people launch campaigns to raise money for some project, endeavor, or financial need, and groups of strangers, friends, and/or followers kick in a few bucks to collectively foot [...]
“Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there—and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.” The “Beat Generation” is a term used to refer to a group of post-World [...]