Although intergenerational population replacement involves long time lags, cultural change can reach a tipping point at which new norms become dominant. Conformism and social desirability effects then reverse polarity: instead of retarding the changes linked with intergenerational population replacement, they accelerate them, bringing unusually rapid cultural change.
~ Ronald Inglehart
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Both Franz Kafka and the Bible are inexhaustible sources of meaning because they overflow any box we build around them. They exist on a plane of Western consciousness so formative of ours today that they seem to come from everywhere and nowhere.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return-and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended?
~ Jenny Odell
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The exile will always be at least slightly alien to her adopted culture. At the same time, her knowledge of that new place and its people is immersive; she is not a tourist and she can never really return to the person she was before she left home. This duality is also the novelist’s superpower.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
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The perfect university provides sex for students, sports for alumni, and parking for faculty.
~ Clark Kerr
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Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.
~ Diane Arbus
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I see no limit to the capabilities of machines. As microchips get smaller and faster, I can see them getting better than we are. I can visualize a time in the future when we will be to robots as dogs are to humans.
~ Claude Shannon
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Michel Houellebecq doesn’t just forecast current events; he satirizes them, dryly, with perfect pitch. His mimicry of the inflated language of marketing, bureaucratic euphemism, and hypertechnical mumbo jumbo finds the exact midpoint between amusing and appalling.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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Some scholars had tried to raise alarms before. In 2019, Dennis Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve encountered fabricated or falsified data.
~ Daniel Engber
via The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger
published in The Atlantic on November 19, 2024
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I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out.
~ Jenny Odell
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