By “Best Ideas,” I don’t specifically mean the best ideas in regard this particular year’s events. Rather, these are the top ideas and arguments I’ve come across in the first half of this year. Many involve looking at an old idea in a new way and most of them are written exceptionally well.
1] This was an interesting thought experiment, asking whether we should treat the flurry of data on today’s social media platforms like yesteryear’s cabinets of curiosities.
2] “On a somewhat different issue, it became clear to me that the management I was dealing with didn’t understand the difference between having an opinion and having an informed, factually sourced opinion.” Paul Krugman’s piece on why he left the New York Times demonstrates a troubling trend in opinion editing toward the fast, the shiny, and the ultimately pointless.
3] I’ve been admiring the Book of Hours of Queen Isabella la Católica. It dates to the 1480s and is a brilliant example of the beautiful artistry that went into these prayer books in the Middle Ages.
4] New Hampshire has launched a hybrid journalism model.
5] The search continues for the rarest book in American literature, The Black Tulip, aka, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems, of which only twelve copies are known to exist.
6] A simple persuasive argument for trusting expertise to the experts; they have the most information and highest quality information on that specific topic and spend their careers studying that information, putting them in the best position to offer an informed opinion.
7] A new exhibition of Robert Caro’s archives has opened at the New York Historical. At age 89, the legendary writer continues to work on the fifth and final installment of his LBJ biography.
8] “Why make something beautiful?”
9] Did you know Florence has a botanical museum, filled with plant specimens from around the globe and wax replicas of fruit? It is a truly gorgeous and inspiring space.
10] One persistent myth of our times is that of people being able to “multitask‘. If you are human, your brain does not multitask – it merely switches from one task to another, and performs neither well. This sobering piece adapted from a new book looks at how the brain actually works, and gives us an idea of what is really going on when we switch between multiple screens.
11] This piece about Graydon Carter’s gilded reign at Vanity Fair – when Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, Sebastian Junger, and Annie Liebovitz were all in the mix – was absolutely jaw-dropping.
12] The Hanseatic League was a medieval coalition of merchants and traders who established long distance European trade. Despite having no established borders or central governing body, this League even waged (and won) wars and signed treaties with foreign rulers. What led to the rise and fall of this storied European network?
13] A thought on the Italian concept of having “a light touch‘.
14] Ian Leslie on the interesting parallels between a nervous Vienna at the turn of the century and our modern malaise.
15] This year marked one hundred years of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, justly celebrated, but there is another Woolf title also turning one hundred; her collection of critical essays called The Common Reader. In it, she proves herself to be a lover of literature as literature.
16] “What does vinyl ask of us”?
17] Searching for the origins of the pork taboo: How fascinating that pork was eaten widely before the Hebrew Talmud and Islamic Quran banned it. What happened?
18] There’s a good chance readers of this website are in this category; individuals who are highly self-controlled tend to prefer doing meaningful activities rather than pleasurable activities in their leisure time. Therefore, you might enjoy your weekend more by taking a cooking or painting class than by going to eat at a restaurant, for example.
19] I loved this entire list of “slightly rude notes on writing“. Slightly rude, perhaps, but certainly true! For example, “lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.”
20] “The world is full of men who think and teach what is right, but when they are called upon to act, they are attacked by doubt and cowardice.” How the Grimm brothers became outcasts of an authoritarian regime.
21] Where did the English word ‘dog’ come from? This, as it turns out, is a surprisingly complicated question.
22] Four remedies for writer’s block. Like this writer, I don’t actually believe in “writer’s block” as such; if a writer feels ‘blocked,’ it probably comes down to not being ready to address a particular topic, fear, or plain exhaustion. In any case, the remedies gathered here actually address those causes, which makes it the rare insightful collection of thinking on an overhyped concept.
23] Who’s afraid of René Descartes? During Descartes’ time, some critics, instead of engaging the arguments the philosopher made, accused him of lying and manipulating his readers to gain a following. Their key criticism was that Descartes was “promoting ignorance”. There was also a religious component at play here, one hundred years into the Protestant Reformation, as these personal attacks came from Protestant leaders who framed Descartes’ philosophy as emblematic of the Catholic Church’s alleged abuses.
24] A two-week break from smartphones can improve mood and mental health as effectively as anti-depressant medications. Yet there is still fierce debate about whether these devices are good for children and teens?
25] “Sabbath hard and go home.” I wish I’d read this thoughtful piece on observing the Sabbath months ago.
Photo by Peter Olexa on Unsplash
