The Chromatic Typewriter is a conceptual art piece by Tyree Callahan. The Bellingham, Washington-based artist modified a 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter, replacing the letters and keys with different colours and associated pads. … It’s important to remember this is a conceptual art piece and not entirely functional.
How does a citizen respond when a democracy that prides itself on being exceptional betrays its highest principles? Plato despaired, but he also pointed the way to renewal.
A democratic society with an exceptionalist heritage may prove unprepared to respond wisely when arrogance takes over.
Socrates’s message could not be more timely. The mantle of glorified greatness belongs to no society by right or by might, or by revered tradition, he taught. It belongs to no individual who, ignoring the claims of justice, strives to make a name that might outlast him. Exceptionalism has to be earned again and again, generation after generation, by citizens committed, together, to the endlessly hard work of sustaining a polity that strives to serve the good of all.
Source: Making Athens Great Again – The Atlantic
Audio: Making Athens Great Again – The Atlantic on SoundCloud
On Sunday’s Face the Nation, Sen. Rand Paul … explained how the NSA routinely and deliberately spies on Americans’ communications — listens to their calls and reads their emails — without a judicial warrant of any kind
A key purpose of the new 2008 FISA law — which then-Senator Obama voted for during the 2008 general election after breaking his primary-race promise to filibuster it — was to legalize the once-controversial Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program, which the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing in 2005.
Perhaps the growing recognition that nobody is immune from such abusive powers will finally reverse that tide.
If nothing else, this debate ought to finally obliterate that pleasing though utterly false myth that the U.S. government does not and cannot spy on Americans’ communications without warrants. It does so constantly, easily, deliberately, and by design.
Source: Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communications Without Warrants
We have come to think of the world less as a social body and more as a collection of individual organs. … The idea of the body as a system is one we embrace. But, we have largely come to reject any idea of society as an integrated system to be carefully maintained. The problem is that society keeps on stubbornly behaving as a system, despite our new faith. … In killing the idea of the social body, presto, there were no more social problems for a leader to fix! Here, the citizen becomes entirely responsible for their own destitution or their own entrepreneurial success.
we will continue to suffer great political illness if we do not revive the idea of the integrated social body
We as individual organs are powerless to influence those big systems like the labor market that affect us so keenly. We do have the power, however, to behave as an organism: One that demands of its leaders to be seen as a social body, both worthy and needful of better and equal health. And there’s no One Weird Trick for a return to that solidarity.
Source: Our obsession with finding miracles cures for complicated problems is what gave us Trump — Quartz
recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle — and not necessarily the biggest piece
Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. For example, deliberate practice explained 26% of the variation for games such as chess, 21% for music, and 18% for sports.
There may be a critical window during childhood for acquiring certain complex skills, just as there seems to be for language.
What all of this evidence indicates is that we are not created equal where our abilities are concerned. … Pretending that all people are equal in their abilities will not change the fact that a person with an average IQ is unlikely to become a theoretical physicist, or the fact that a person with a low level of music ability is unlikely to become a concert pianist.
If we acknowledge that people differ in what they have to contribute, then we have an argument for a society in which all human beings are entitled to a life that includes access to decent housing, healthcare, and education, simply because they are human. Our abilities might not be identical, and our needs surely differ, but our basic human rights are universal.
Source: The 10,000-hour rule is wrong and perpetuates a cruel myth – Business Insider
Source: Practice Does Not Make Perfect – Slate