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The Future of College?
The Atlantic: On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose streets are heavily populated with winos and vagrants, and whose buildings host hip new businesses, many of them tech start-ups.
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What Makes People Look Like Their Pets?
Slate: If ever you overhear someone comparing you to a dog, chances are it’s not a compliment. Yes, there’s the famous loyalty of dogs, their unbridled enthusiasm for life, their boundless love and devotion, their fierce protectiveness—qualities that any of us would be lucky to possess at even a modicum of their standard manifestation in the canine. Typically, though, it’s meant as a slight and a reference to some especially animalistic aspect of our four-legged friends. As much as we might quibble over the virtues and vices of Canis domesticus, however, and over whether human nature is any better or worse than dog nature, even dog fanciers don’t usually want to look like a dog.
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Steven Pinker: 10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s OK to break (sometimes)
The Guardian: Among the many challenges of writing is dealing with rules of correct usage: whether to worry about split infinitives, fused participles, and the meanings of words such as "fortuitous", "decimate" and "comprise". Supposedly a writer has to choose between two radically different approaches to these rules. Prescriptivists prescribe how language ought to be used. They uphold standards of excellence and a respect for the best of our civilisation, and are a bulwark against relativism, vulgar populism and the dumbing down of literate culture. Descriptivists describe how language actually is used.
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Thinking Like A Scientist Can Help Overcome Allure Of Appearances
NPR: Not long ago, Caren Walker, a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley, was hiking in Tilden Park with her brother Michael when they came upon what looked like wild carrots. "Yum, yum, yum!" exclaimed Michael (with perhaps greater eloquence, but no less enthusiasm). "These will make a tasty soup!" Hours later at the hospital, drinking a thick black tar to prevent the effects of what turned out to be poison hemlock, Caren wished she'd heeded her initial skepticism about the wisdom of cooking up the colorful roots. "Silly brother," she could have said, but didn't, "don't you know that appearances can be deceiving?" Read the whole story: NPR
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What Makes a Family of Artists
The New Yorker: The debate over the nature of creativity is an old one: Is creative talent, be it novelistic, musical, or artistic, something that you’re born with, or is it something that anyone, with practice and dedication, can acquire? Anecdotally, the first option presents a strong case. The Waugh family produced three generations of novelists: Arthur, then Alec and Evelyn, then Auberon (Evelyn’s son). From the affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West came the novelist Anthony West.
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The Psychology of Oversharing Facebook Couples
The Atlantic: Okay, so maybe you don’t want to know the nickname that girl from your high school has given her new paramour, just like you don’t particularly want to know the color of the daisies he bought her last week, or what they ate on their anniversary date, or the fact that he is, hands down, the best boyfriend ever. Surely, there are other, more valuable things that could be taking up the space in your brain currently occupied by the knowledge that she’s the luckiest girl in the world. But chances are you know these things anyway, because Facebook knows them, too. ...
