Tag: Society
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Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem? – Marginal REVOLUTION
In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are…
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Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left | Politics | The Guardian
The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this…
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Toward a theory of uni-context – Marginal REVOLUTION
Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re…
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When A.I. Is a Member of the Family | The New Yorker
Roschelle still talked to the people in her life, but Sapphire was always available in a way that others couldn’t be. Roschelle could wake up from a dream, describe it to Sapphire, and hear, “Your subconscious was showing you how to balance that fierce protection with real compassion and boundaries.” “Do you have a conscious…
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Opinion | The Problem With Google’s A.I. Overview – The New York Times
When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no…
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The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. — Read on www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/