Imagine a person who is very lazy at work, yet whose customers are (along with everyone else concerned) quite satisfied. It could be a slow-talking rural shop proprietor from an old movie, or some kind of Taoist fisherman – perhaps a bit of a buffoon, but definitely deeply content. In order to be…

The wide popularity of Jordan Peterson, a once-obscure Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor who has become beloved of the alt-right, is a proof that the liberal-conservative “silent majority” finally found its voice. Peterson, who has said that the idea of white privilege is a…

REVIEW ESSAY Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris Little, Brown, 2017, 272 pages T he first time I remember really fearing for my generation—not the abstract uneasiness aroused by depressing statistics but a gut-level dread, something dark and unnameable…

I think the Pareto (80/20) Principle accurately applies to the social difficulties of autistic individuals. That is to say, 80% of my problems as an aspie stem from 20% of my total social deficits. This speaks little of the frustration and effort involved in learning to approximate neurotypicals.…

I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish. (this is going to end up being a metaphor for something, so bear with me) The…

When I first started writing about religion for Ribbonfarm, I argued that humans have the capacity for interesting mental states that have become harder to access during the transition to modernity. Here, I focus on the core mental state at the heart of religion, the sacred experience. When I first…

Last year, I discovered Ursula LeGuin’s fascinating talk, ( transcript ) by way of Donna Haraway’s equally interesting talk Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene . Both have been nagging at me for a year now. The theory, building on the significance of containers (bags, baskets) to early humans —…

Crying “free exchange of ideas!” misses the cultural meaning of protest in a society coming apart. T he recent wave of protests at American colleges — in which students express their anger at the presence on their campuses of ideas and speakers that they believe to lie outside the boundaries of…

When Pizza reached 100,000 followers on Tumblr, she posted apicture of a pizza box, takeout chicken wings, and an orange soda spread out onher bed: “ pizza and chicken wings 2 celebrate .” One fan replied,“CONGRATULATIONS GIRL! YOU DESERVE IT!” Another: “MOTHER OF GOD 100K?!?!” Ananonymous user was…

I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’t have any idea what’s going on. They seem to be saying things that are either morally repugnant or utterly…

Perhaps no new concept from the world of academic psychology has taken hold of the public imagination more quickly and profoundly in the 21st century than implicit bias — that is, forms of bias which operate beyond the conscious awareness of individuals. That’s in large part due to the blockbuster…

S cientists look around the universe and see amazing structure. There are objects and processes of fantastic complexity. Every action in our universe follows exact laws of nature that are perfectly expressed in a mathematical language. These laws of nature appear fine-tuned to bring about life, and…

L ate in August, as a shadow 70 miles wide was traveling across the United States, turning day briefly to night and millions of Americans into watchers of the skies, the British classicist Emily Wilson, a woman of 45 prone to energetic explanations and un-self-conscious laughter, was leading me…

M any were surprised to see the notoriously centrist Vox.com run a glowing profile of a revolutionary socialist quarterly. In leftist circles Vox is generally derided for its bland liberal politics, so when it published a lengthy examination of the popular socialist magazine Jacobin , a hatchet job…

I’m James Bridle . I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. Please be advised: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing graphic and video…

Want to receive exclusive insights from The Atlantic—while supporting a sustainable future for independent journalism? Join our new membership program, The Masthead . As always, a horror film managed to express the idea before the scientists ever could, and in better, more visceral terms. “The…

Andrew Bret Wallis/Getty Images Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has…

[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.] [Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook who has since become somewhat famous. I’ve renamed him here to “Andrew Cord” to protect his identity.]…

Lovecraftian monsters really do exist. There are vast burning demons, things from far beyond our tiny world, things that you can’t even look at without going incurably mad. A being that is absolutely here but whose immenseness extends out into the cosmic distance of a fevered incomprehension. The…

“I don’t know how to be human any more.” On a wretched December afternoon in 2015, as raindrops pattered a planetary threnody on grayed-out streets, five thousand activists gathered around Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, hoping to force world leaders to do something, anything, that would save the future.…

Leaving Conservatism Behind Leaving Conservatism Behind ▪ Summer 2016 The abandoned International Boiler Works, East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania (Nicholas A. Tonelli) “You see that factory, Matt?” my father would say to me, as we passed a drab building in his pickup truck. “Every time I drive…

This is a guest post by Jacob Falkovich . Our world is filled with competition, frenzied ambition in every domain. In Western nations, and above all in the United States, it animates not only economic and financial life, but scientific research and intellectual life as well. Despite the tension and…

Erik (HASH) Hersman We generally admit that humility is a virtue and ego is a vice. Yet this black and white definition is made complicated by the fact that any sensible person would also admit that confidence is important. We’d say it’s more than important—we know that confidence is essential.…

It's easy to get into Confederate Facebook. Just go to a news article about a police shooting and scroll down to the comments. Most comment sections are linked to people's Facebook accounts, so you just have to find someone with a Confederate flag avatar expressing a racist opinion, click through to…

I believe that moods (or less colloquially, states of mind) can be used not just defensively , making the best of whatever mood you’re in (as I described in Productivity for Precious Snowflakes ). They can also be used offensively , to proactively create the conditions for rapid acceleration and…

image via Alexey Kljatov By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs We’ve been told for years now that what our parents and kindergarten teachers told us is not, in fact, true — we are not each and every one of us special unique snowflakes destined for greatness. In this essay I want to offer a new theory of…

When writing Ecce Homo in the late 1880s, Nietzsche sought to resurrect the Voltairean spirit in Europe, which he felt by his times had been washed away by pessimistic Romanticism. “Voltaire still comprehended umanità in the Renaissance,” Nietzsche wrote, “the cause of taste, of science, of the…

I searched for “vim directory structure” many times online and have rarely found something that helps me out. Generally I’m looking for the right place to put some random .vim file that I downloaded or which directory to put indentation or file type recognizer files. To compile this information, I…

Just three years ago, in 2014, I wrote a little short story set in a future where most work is organized around blockchains. That story was set sometime past the 2120s, but it appears we’ll get there a century earlier than I thought. The idea of organizing work through smart contracts on blockchains…

After eavesdropping on a thousand Twitter arguments and reading just as many thinkpieces, I’ve noticed that there are two main ways of conceptualizing community governance. Both are normative. Both primarily arise when it comes to conflicts over free speech — or who it’s okay to punch. A glitched…

This is a guest post by Mike Travers, who develops software at Collaborative Drug Discovery , blogs on diverse topics at Omniorthogonal , collects his random hacks at Hyperphor , and has a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences . The scientific picture of the world has some disturbing implications when its…

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal . Are ordinary people really populations of interests rather than something more solid? It’s disturbing to think of yourself as so fluid, so potentially unstable, held together only by the shifting influence of available…

Terry Bisson, 1991 Someone did a radio play of this... "They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're…

Humans naturally think about their own behaviors in terms of peak and trough performance levels, rather than means or medians. Without any performance tracking, we know our limits in a variety of domains. Each time we attempt a performance episode in any skilled domain, these limits change, yielding…

This is a guest post by Taylor Pearson. “[M]ental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” –Viktor Frankl The healthy state of humans is mild…

(Originally published at Ribbonfarm .) Here's a recipe for discovering new ideas: Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking. Predict, on the basis of #1, where you're likely to have blind spots. Start groping around in those areas. If you can do this with the very…

Being pretty self-taught as far as UI design goes, I’ve always wondered why so many articles and books talk about color theory and palettes. In my experience, using a “split complementary palette” is about 0% predictive of me making nice-looking designs. I have another word for that sort of thing:…

John Dewey, the 20th Century educational philosopher, wrote a book called ‘Art as Experience,’ which has been largely forgotten by history. It happens to contain a more-or-less complete philosophy of aesthetics, the comprehensiveness and usefulness of which has never been matched. Dewey’s writing…

Superintelligence The Idea That Eats Smart People In 1945, as American physicists were preparing to test the atomic bomb, it occurred to someone to ask if such a test could set the atmosphere on fire. This was a legitimate concern. Nitrogen, which makes up most of the atmosphere, is not…

Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy in practice seems to be a cruel and even silly joke. I learned that the hard way when I went to college long before I ever studied strategy formally. My own “strategy” about how to get through college collapsed virtually the moment I set foot on…