Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) …I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery prayer of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.
If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600.
From a letter W. H. Auden wrote to his father in October of 1942, explaining his decision to use a largely contemporary setting for his long poem For the Time Being: a Christmas Oratorio. I’m working on a critical edition of that poem for Princeton University Press, and goodness, it’s fun.
The idea that a doctorate in history prepares one only, or primarily, to teach in a college or university is as contingent as any other, not only historically but also geographically. In Germany—the country that gave us the research university—doctorates in history and similar fields have traditionally been considered appropriate preparation for jobs in publishing, media, business, and politics. A first step towards adjusting graduate education to occupational realities would be to change our attitudes and our language, to make clear to students entering programs in history that we are offering them education that we believe in, not just as reproductions of ourselves, but also as contributors to public culture and even the private sector. A second, and much bigger, step would be to examine the training we offer, and work out how to preserve its best traditional qualities while adding new options. If we tell new students that a history PhD opens many doors, we need to broaden the curriculum to ensure that we’re telling the truth. If the policy arena offers opportunities, and we think it does, then interested students need some space (and encouragement) to take courses in statistics, economics, or public policy. Accounting, acting, graphic design, advanced language training: students thinking at once creatively and pragmatically have all sorts of options at our research universities. And of course there’s the whole exploding realm of digital history and humanities, and the range of skills required to practice them.
Amazon has targeted a certain type of consumer: one who is already a loyal Amazon customer and wants a best-in-class e-reader that also has limited tablet functionality and a great media-consuming experience. Throughout Amazon’s demonstration of the Fire, they never once showed how you would use it to check e-mail or write a school paper, or how it would be used by small business and enterprises or doctors or lawyers. Instead they focused on consuming media from Amazon’s services. Trying to be all things to all people would be a failing strategy for Amazon.
More than just an engrossing yarn, Mr. Glenny’s book takes an anthropological approach to the DarkMarket community, elucidating its conflicting motivations, ruthless tactics and anarchist philosophy. Even though many cyber criminals have day jobs, they spend inordinate amounts of time online, mostly in a futile attempt to impress their peers and join the ranks of the digital übermenschen. Many choose cybercrime for the same reasons that disaffected youngsters choose more pedestrian forms of crime; tales of desperation, rejection and poverty loom large in this book. Faced with an unpalatable choice between a life of violent crime or seemingly victimless cybercrime, 13-year-olds in Ukraine choose the latter. This is Mr. Glenny’s most perceptive insight: Regardless of how much money governments and corporations spend on upgrading computer security, the war on cybercrime cannot be won without mastering the psychology of its practitioners.
As Twitter’s message traffic has grown explosively, so has the scientific appetite for the insights the data can yield. Dozens of new scholarly studies over the past 18 months by computer-network analysts and sociologists have plumbed the public torrents of data made available by Twitter through special links with the company’s computer servers. This research has harnessed the service to monitor political activity and employee morale, track outbreaks of flu and food poisoning, map fluctuations in moods around the world, predict box-office receipts for new movies, and get a jump on changes in the stock market. When the magnitude 8.8 Chilean earthquake hit last year, researchers found that on Twitter the truth often won out over misinformation. “When a rumor is true, it spreads faster,” said computer analyst Barbara Poblete at the University of Chile in Santiago.
That’s a big claim. Is there more than one data point to support it?
portraitoftheartistasayoungman:
Harold N. Fisk’s 1944 maps of the Mississippi River’s path over time.(via Flavorwire via Benjamin)
In sum, the NYT screwed up. Lindstrom appears to have a habit of making overblown claims about neuroimaging evidence, so it’s not surprising he would write this type of piece; but the NYT editorial staff is supposedly there to filter out precisely this kind of pseudoscientific advertorial. And they screwed up. It’s a particularly big screw-up given that (a) as of right now, Lindstrom’s Op-Ed is the single most emailed article on the NYT site, and (b) this incident almost perfectly recapitulates another NYT article 4 years ago in which some neuroscientists and neuromarketers wrote a grossly overblown Op-Ed claiming to be able to infer, in detail, people’s opinions about presidential candidates. That time, Russ Poldrack and a bunch of other big names in cognitive neuroscience wrote a concise rebuttal that appeared in the NYT (but unfortunately, isn’t linked to from the original Op-Ed, so anyone who stumbles across the original now has no way of knowing how ridiculous it is). One hopes the NYT follows up in similar fashion this time around. They certainly owe it to their readers–some of whom, if you believe Lindstrom, are now in danger of dumping their current partners for their iPhones.
I don’t think this has the effect that Facebook wants. I don’t think a frog-boiling style of slow erosion of privacy means people just continue to share in the same way except in public. It means that the people who understand what’s going on become wary, stop trusting, and eventually stop using the service. And people who don’t understand what’s happening will eventually hit situations in which something doesn’t work the way they thought it did (often embarrassingly), and the uncertainty of their mental model will result in less usage and make that usage more tentative and more careful.Ultimately, it just means less intimacy. Less signal. Less of exactly what this kind of technology is supposed to enable.
— Joe Moon
Less signal and less intimacy, yes — but only microscopically less. What percentage of Facebook’s 800 million users have any awareness of these matters whatsoever? I can’t imagine it would be more than 2 percent; I would guess less than 1. And how many of those are seriously bothered by Facebook’s campaign against privacy? Surely far less than half. Facebook is in a position where it can aggregate significantly more information at the cost of alienating a tiny percentage of its users, many of whom will get over their alienation. There’s no real downside for them.
Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3PRmu0tr6k?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]