Artisans of Words hedgehogreview.com

Complexity should not make us give up on words or reality; it should help us see that both are contested. [...] Clichés, stale metaphors, and repeating what everyone else already says is a great way of avoiding thinking. Surrounded by unthinking language, students select the least thinking option for writing.

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Restoring the past won’t liberate Palestine nytimes.com

A good deal of the antipathy toward Israeli Jews today is undergirded and enabled, I believe, by something that to some ears sounds progressive: the idea that people and lands that have been colonized must be returned to their indigenous peoples and original state. But that belief, when taken literally, is, at best, a kind of left-wing originalism, a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present. At worst, it is a left-wing echo to the ancestral fantasies of the far right, in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.

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Settler colonialism is not distinctly Western or European aeon.co

If we define settler colonialism as the coercive displacement of Indigenous peoples by settlers, then a wide range of cases fit this bill. To list just a few in Asia: China settled millions of Han Chinese to Xinjiang and Tibet in the 1960s and ’70s; Sri Lanka resettled hundreds of thousands of Sinhalese to formerly Tamil areas in the 1960s and ’70s; Thailand resettled more than 100,000 Buddhists to its southern Malay areas in the 1960s and ’70s; Bangladesh settled 400,000 Bengalis to the Chittagong Hills in the 1970s and ’80s; and Iraq resettled tens of thousands of Arabs to Kurdish areas in the 1980s and ’90s. More recently, in 2018 Myanmar began to attract Buddhists to formerly Muslim Rohingya areas, and in 2019 India controversially made it much easier for Hindus to emigrate to Kashmir. [...] Yet, settler colonialism in the Global South fails to attract international attention. Maps circulating online depicting where settler colonialism is ‘still a reality’, for instance, almost exclusively depict areas settled by Europeans. Colonised peoples in the Global South have experienced a double erasure: first by settlers and second by settler colonial studies.

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How to comment on social media lithub.com

Anything not declared in the post is something O.P. does not care about/is complicit with. Every expression of concern is in fact an expression of unconcern about something else.

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Slow change can be radical change lithub.com

Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it. [...] Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite: an argument that the status quo must be changed, and it will take steadfast commitment to see the job through. It’s not accepting defeat; it’s accepting the terms of possible victory. Distance runners pace themselves; activists and movements often need to do the same, and to learn from the timelines of earlier campaigns to change the world that have succeeded.

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Notes on nationalism orwellfoundation.com

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

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You can’t fact check propaganda hedgehogreview.com

Note the absence of any mention of truth or falsehood. Instead, these classic definitions place propaganda within the airier realm of rumor, report, picture, suggestion, and symbol. A baldfaced lie would theoretically be open to falsification, which would leave the speaker exposed and discredited. So the skillful propagandist instead works by insinuation, by spinning the significance of events in one way or another, by bringing the reader, listener, or viewer around to a particular point of view. Propaganda creates a general atmosphere in which a particular conclusion seems undeniable, even though it is suggested rather than stated. What matters is not the facts, but their significance.

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How China is tearing down Islam ig.ft.com

What happened to their communities has been repeated across China, with hundreds of mosques modified over the past five years. Satellite imagery shows at least 1,714 buildings have been altered, stripped or destroyed. The government says the changes are to modernise the mosques and “harmonise” them with Chinese culture.

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People reluctant to kill for an abstraction, a movement slate.com

Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night, worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet. When wrong, we think about it awhile, then apologize.

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The extreme ambitions of West Bank settlers newyorker.com

For decades, Daniella Weiss has been one of the leaders of Israel’s settlement movement. [...] Weiss and I recently spoke by phone. [...] I wanted to talk to Weiss to understand the extremism of the settler movement, and her ultimate intentions for the West Bank.

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Up in Arms lrb.co.uk

Reports of global rearmament earlier this year were described in the press as a ‘shot in the arm’ for the British economy, but increasing sales have not prompted increased scrutiny. In 2008, the IDF general Gadi Eizenkot outlined the Dahiya doctrine, named for the neighbourhood of Beirut where Hizbullah was based during the 2006 Lebanon War and which was flattened by the IDF. ‘What happened in the Dahiya quarter ... will happen in every village,’ Eizenkot told an Israeli newspaper. ‘We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel ... From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases ... This is not a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised.’ Eizenkot became head of the IDF in 2015; he now sits in the Knesset and joined the war cabinet following the 7 October attacks. It shouldn’t take the images coming daily from Gaza to prove that the risk is more than ‘purely theoretical’.

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Secularism in Iran is not just a form of Western imperialism aeon.co

One initial concern about this narrative surrounds the legitimacy of the sharp ‘East v West’ dichotomy central to it. The Islamic Republic thrives on this dichotomy. Indeed, it is its entire ideological foundation. One issue is that it is ambiguous who or what ‘the West’ is supposed to be in this context. It is evident that ‘the West’ is considered more than a mere geographical designation. But is it a specific socioeconomic system (ie, capitalism)? A level of development in science and technology? A confederacy of states with shared political interests? A moral framework? At times, Khomeini equated ‘the West’ with colonialism, but at other times he emphasised its essential nature as one of decadence or a lack of morality. This point is important because, without a credible definition of ‘the West’ (and ‘the East’, for that matter), the narrative threatens to make superficial any political analysis involving it. This is evident, for instance, in the fact that many Muslim-majority countries, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, and other countries with histories of colonial subjection, such as Japan, have moved beyond the dichotomy, adopting some typically ‘Western’ values without sacrificing their own cultural identity.

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Your services as guidance counselor are no longer required, Mr. Vonnegut mcsweeneys.net

In fact, you have at times seemed to question the very concept of a career. On September 28, you told senior Barry Platowski, “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” As a result, Barry declined to write his SATs and is now talking about taking the year off to “focus on my DJing.”

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The agony of waiting for a ceasefire that never comes newyorker.com

My mother does not like it when we visit home. In one of her dreams, our house was destroyed, and she was collecting rubble. But my father couldn’t not go back, because he had to feed his birds and rabbits.

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Iran's secular shift: new survey reveals huge changes in religious beliefs theconversation.com

Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.

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Israele, il Sudafrica, l’Algeria e noi rivistailmulino.it

Tornando ai giorni nostri, è evidente che una fetta, piccola ma non trascurabile, della sinistra occidentale legge la realtà israeliana secondo il paradigma algerino. L’oppressione palestinese si risolve perseguitando la popolazione israeliana al punto da convincerla a fare le valige: è la decolonizzazione, bellezza. Quello che sfugge è che c’è una differenza, fondamentale, tra Israele e l’Algérie française: a differenza dei pieds-noirs, gli israeliani non hanno una “Francia” a cui tornare. Si ha un bel dire “rimandiamoli da dove vengono”, ignorando che molti israeliani discendono da luoghi – il Marocco, lo Yemen, la Polonia – dove sarebbe impensabile ritornare. Più seriamente, poi, la popolazione israeliana è radicata lì, ormai esiste una realtà normalizzata, una nazione, un’identità israeliana, che magari a qualcuno può non piacere ma è un dato di fatto.

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Israelis now face the consequences of a long occupation newlinesmag.com

I turned to Katia and asked what would become of this place of radical contrasts and deep uncertainty. In Tel Aviv, gay married couples lived happily in a sunny Mediterranean city full of fashionable people, artists, intellectuals and rich tech bros who divided their time among Silicon Valley, Europe’s capital cities and multimillion-dollar apartments in the neighborhood where, 20 years earlier, I had paid monthly rent of just $500 for an unrenovated but spacious, light-filled, Bauhaus-style apartment. Now, the construction of luxury apartment complexes could barely keep up with demand. [...] And yet, the West Bank and Gaza are less than one hour’s drive, in opposite directions, from the salubrious delights of Tel Aviv’s cafes, art galleries, clubs and beaches.

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The burden of the humanities newcriterion.com

Why should we study the past? If the state of our present discourse is any indication, the point of doing so is simply to provide us with ever better weapons to use in our present battles. [...] The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing or translating them into something else—as into physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, the agent as well as the acted upon.

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I can eat glass, it does not hurt me en.wikipedia.org

I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project. [...] The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" from a wide variety of languages. [...] Visitors to a foreign country have "an irresistible urge" to say something in that language, and whatever they say (a cited example being along the lines of "Where is the bathroom?") usually marks them as tourists immediately. Saying "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", however, ensures that the speaker "will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect".

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Reading Well map.simonsarris.com

I also tend to stress fiction because I think, especially among my professional peers in the industry of software, that there is too great a fondness for non-fiction. I think this arises from a belief that superior knowledge of the world comes from non-fiction. This thought is attractive to people who build systems, but over-systematizing and seeing systems in everything can be a failure mode. Careful descriptions and summaries miss too much of the world. Hard distinctions make bad philosophy. Reading fiction helps you become an unsystematic thinker, something that is equally valuable but more elided by some engineers. It is easy to maintain an intellectual rigidity. It takes more care to maintain a loose poeticism of thought.

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Anti-Racist Reading Lists: What Are They For? vulture.com

For such a list to do good, something keener than “anti-racism” must be sought. The word and its nominal equivalent, “anti-racist,” suggests something of a vanity project, where the goal is no longer to learn more about race, power, and capital, but to spring closer to the enlightened order of the antiracist. [...] It is unfair to beg other literature and other authors, many of them dead, to do this sort of work for someone. If you want to read a novel, read a damn novel, like it’s a novel.

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Reading Ourselves to Death thenewatlantis.com

If an alien landed on Earth today, it might assume that reading and writing are our species’ main function, second only to sleeping and well ahead of eating and reproducing.

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Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction? newyorker.com

Rooney, like her characters, seems content to perform awareness of inequality, even to exploit it as a device, but not to engage with it as a profound and messy reality.

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Whataboutism en.wikipedia.org

Whataboutism denotes in a pejorative sense a procedure in which a critical question or argument is not answered or discussed, but retorted with a critical counter-question which expresses a counter-accusation.

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Toward a Leisure Ethic hedgehogreview.com

How people spend their time is a fundamental mark of civilization, but it is a category that tends to be lost beneath a society’s scientific, technological, military, and material attainments. Rarely do we notice that, temporally speaking, the scope of human freedom is as circumscribed as it ever was—and in some respects, much more so. In the rich societies of the twenty-first century, most people spend their prime years locked in meaningless, unessential, work punctuated by meaningless entertainment. [...] How one fills one’s discretionary time is heavily determined by the mentally and physically depleting effects of work, and by the imminent return to work after some invariably short period of respite. Leisure today exists for work, which means that it is not actually leisure at all. The more appropriate term is recreation, a mere means of recovery—re-creating the body—for the sake of doing more work.

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How to text, tip, ghost, host, and generally exist in polite society today thecut.com

Never ask anyone what their job is. It’s classist and boring. Try three other topics first.

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A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived psyche.co

‘Throughout the whole history of science,’ wrote Abraham Flexner in 1939, ‘most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.’

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The Case Against Travel newyorker.com

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it. Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.

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La storia di Berlusconi con i se wittgenstein.it

Un altro modo di metterla è: tolti i disastri, il berlusconismo ha lasciato eredità solide e durature da rinfacciargli? O la sua leggerezza inconsistente di articolazione progettuale e politica ha limitato al suo periodo di potere i disastri, e poi fine? In questo senso, se chiedeste a me, gli italiani sono stati peggiorati molto di più dalle predicazioni e propagande leghiste, fasciste, grilline: sono queste, molto di più della vacuità ottimista berlusconiana, ad aver creato un popolo di risentiti rancorosi desiderosi di capri espiatori e di legittimazioni ai propri vittimismi.

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Hating Everyone Everywhere All At Once At Stanford popehat.substack.com

When it comes to rights, deserve’s got nothing to do with it. [...] Rights protect awful totalitarian people all the time. There are many philosophical reasons for this; one is the recognition that we can’t be trusted to decide who should or shouldn’t get rights, and that arrogating such power to ourselves will inevitably favor the powerful and popular over the powerless and unpopular.

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All the nerds are dead samkriss.substack.com

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste. The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toilet paper from a small-batch paper factory in Abkhazia that included small fragments of tree bark in the pulp. The hipster swam deep into the vastness of human data, and always surfaced with pearls. Through its powers of snobbery and disdain, the hipster could effortlessly filter out what was good. [...] The nerd doesn’t like bad things because of their actual qualities; the nerd likes bad things simply because they’re there. What counts is collecting, itemising, consuming.

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wisdom.md github.com

These are ideas that I have believed to be true for myself at the time of composition. They are not immutable truths about The Universe, and I am open to changing my mind about any of them at any time.

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The UK economy has two regional problems, not one ft.com

This report concludes that low shares of university graduates in lagging regions are no longer a constraint. Nor is a generalised lack of finance. More plausible constraints are weak transport infrastructure, failure to support innovation clusters outside the South East and constraints on migration to London and the South East, due to costly housing.

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Why Is Everything So Ugly? nplusonemag.com

The new ugliness is defined in part by an abandonment of function and form: buildings afraid to look like buildings, cars that look like renderings, restaurants that look like the apps that control them. New York City is a city increasingly in quotation marks, a detailed facsimile of a place.

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The Impotence of Being Clever hedgehogreview.com

In Woody Allen’s films and perhaps most clearly in Seinfeld, Jewish alienation became mainstream. In Seinfeld, alienation from WASP social mores and practices bleeds into an everyday alienation from society itself. George Costanza’s myriad paranoid anxieties about navigating work, romance, and consumerism are relatable (if exaggerated) not just to Jews but to any American urbanite. (As Lenny Bruce put it, “If you live in New York, you’re Jewish.”) The show’s cleverness defangs not anti-Semitism, but a fundamental anxiety of American-style individualism: namely, that we’ve become unmoored from any genuine communal context. The show constantly cuts that anxiety down to size by generating clever jokes out of the mundane dilemmas faced daily by disconnected operators in such a culture, especially around their inability to form and maintain genuine romantic relationships.

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Why we stopped making Einsteins erikhoel.substack.com

For paradoxically there exists an agreed-upon and specific answer to the single best way to educate children, a way that has clear, obvious, and strong effects. The problem is that this answer is unacceptable. The superior method of education is deeply unfair and privileges those at the very top of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s an answer that was well-known historically, and is also observed by education researchers today: tutoring.

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The Case Against the Trauma Plot newyorker.com

In “Maus,” Art Spiegelman strives to understand his overbearing father, a Holocaust survivor. “I used to think the war made him that way,” he says. His stepmother, Mala, replies, “Fah! I went through the camp. All our friends went through the camps. Nobody is like him!” Mala won’t cede her knowledge of her husband or of life to the coercive tidiness of the trauma plot. There are other doubting Malas. I start seeing them everywhere, even lurking inside the conventional trauma story with designs of their own, unravelling it from within.

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Map–territory relation en.wikipedia.org

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

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All models are wrong en.wikipedia.org

No models are [true] — not even the Newtonian laws. When you construct a model you leave out all the details which you, with the knowledge at your disposal, consider inessential.... Models should not be true, but it is important that they are applicable, and whether they are applicable for any given purpose must of course be investigated. This also means that a model is never accepted finally, only on trial.

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'London Bridge is down': the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death theguardian.com

There will be no extemporising with the Queen. The newsreaders will wear black suits and black ties. Category one was made for her. Programmes will stop. Networks will merge. BBC 1, 2 and 4 will be interrupted and revert silently to their respective idents – an exercise class in a village hall, a swan waiting on a pond – before coming together for the news. Listeners to Radio 4 and Radio 5 live will hear a specific formulation of words, “This is the BBC from London,” which, intentionally or not, will summon a spirit of national emergency. […] The royal standard will appear on the screen. The national anthem will play. You will remember where you were. […] More overwhelming than any of this, though, there will be an almighty psychological reckoning for the kingdom that she leaves behind. The Queen is Britain’s last living link with our former greatness – the nation’s id, its problematic self-regard – which is still defined by our victory in the second world war. One leading historian, who like most people I interviewed for this article declined to be named, stressed that the farewell for this country’s longest-serving monarch will be magnificent. “Oh, she will get everything,” he said. “We were all told that the funeral of Churchill was the requiem for Britain as a great power. But actually it will really be over when she goes.”

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The Man Who Explains Italy newyorker.com

Today, Italy has a large government with a dazzling number of laws—more than ten times as many as Germany—and the country is full of bright, industrious people who spend an enormous amount of time and energy creatively breaking them.

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Tolerance Does Not (Necessarily) Equal Approval econlib.org

Classical tolerance does not mean approval, it does not mean affirmation, it does not mean acceptance — it just means tolerating something. [...] Tolerance as acceptance, however, is placing a much greater demand on people. It says “It’s not enough that you leave me to live my life in peace. You must also approve of how I live my life. I have a right to require that your personal thoughts, feeling, and convictions be favorably disposed towards me – if they are not, you have failed in your obligations to me.” This is too much. People don’t have a right to prevent you from living as you wish, but they do have a right to be wrong.

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The housing theory of everything worksinprogress.co

Constraints on supply have made houses into scarce assets, more like bonds, fine art or precious metals than durable goods like refrigerators or cars. This only feels normal because we’re used to it, and does not happen in places where developers can easily add more homes to an area, such as Tokyo, Seoul, or New York City before the 1920s. In places like these, rising demand leads to more supply, not just higher prices.

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Love the Fig newyorker.com

Figs are high in calcium, easy to chew and digest, and, unlike plants that fruit seasonally, can be found year-round. This is the fig plant’s accommodation of the fig wasp. A fig wasp departs a ripe fig to find an unripe fig, which means that there must always be figs at different stages. As a result, an animal can usually fall back on a fig when a mango or a lychee is not in season. Sometimes figs are the only things between an animal and starvation. According to a 2003 study of Uganda’s Budongo Forest, for instance, figs are the sole source of fruit for chimpanzees at certain times of year. Our pre-human ancestors probably filled up on figs, too. The plants are what is known as a keystone species: yank them from the jungle and the whole ecosystem would collapse.

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The death of Elizabeth II marks the end of an era economist.com

Walter Bagehot once wrote that monarchy “acts as a disguise” allowing a nation “to change without heedless people knowing it”. By living so long, Elizabeth offered the illusion of stability to a nation that was in truth changing markedly.

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yak shaving en.wiktionary.org

A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task

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Elite overproduction en.wikipedia.org

Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability.

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In Praise of Idleness harpers.org

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. […] When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit.

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The Tyranny of Stuctureless jofreeman.com

All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of "structurelessness," there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.

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Why Britain’s homes are so hot theguardian.com

The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.

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The idea of primitive communism is as seductive as it is wrong aeon.co

The popularity of the idea of primitive communism, especially in the face of contradictory evidence, tells us something important about why narratives succeed. Primitive communism may misrepresent forager societies. But it is simple, and it accords with widespread beliefs about the arc of human history. If we assume that societies went from small to big, or from egalitarian to despotic, then it makes sense that they transitioned from property-less harmony to selfish competition, too. Even if the facts of primitive communism are off, the story feels right.

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Toleration is an impressive virtue that’s worth reviving psyche.co

To tolerate, as Williams stresses, is to be conflicted. Toleration involves putting up with something that you would rather not be the case.

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Enactivism edge.org

In other words, there’s no third-person view of the world. There is one world per observer, and no more than one at a time.

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Reasonable person principle cs.cmu.edu

Everyone will be reasonable. Everyone expects everyone else to be reasonable. No one is special. Do not be offended if someone suggests you are not being reasonable.

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The Work You Do, the Person You Are newyorker.com

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.

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Fernando Pessoa’s disappearing act newyorker.com

“Freedom is the possibility of isolation,” he writes in the final entry. “If you cannot live alone, then you were born a slave.”

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The Bookish Life firstthings.com

The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so… . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.

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