L.M. Sacasas
Over 34,000 subscribers
A newsletter about technology, culture., and the good life. The general idea is to think well about the meaning of technology and how it structures our experience while also conveying some sense of how we might better order our relationship to technology.
Read MoreHow Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again, Michael Luo
…Trump showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with…. Previous presidents and national politicians. They may spin the truth, bend it, or break it, but they pay homage to it and regard it as a boundary. Trump's approach is entirely different….
He was asserting that truth and falsehood were subject to his will…. The lying reflects a strategy,... a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood….
Read MoreValor Collegiate Academy in Nashville encourages students to share what's going on in their lives and to accept support, creating what they call a community of care. We hear from high school teacher Natalie Nikitas and Valor students as they give their Brief But Spectacular take on building trust at school.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Challenges to top-down power are spreading. Compassion-minded people are developing ways to empower people rooted in mutual respect. In his February 16 Washington Post column, Fareed Zakaria affirmed “bottom-up systems” that cultivate “organic communities, rooted in freedom and choice, built bottom-up not top-down.” Changes within the National Football League also illustrate aspects of this cultural revolution.
During this year’s Super Bowl, when he was angry about not being in the game, Travis Kelce, Kansas City Chief’s star tight end, walked up to his coach, yelled at him, bumped into him, and knocked him off balance. The coach, Andy Reid, shrugged it. off.
Bill Belichick, the former New England Patriots coach who led the NFL's greatest dynasty, would never have responded that way. He was an authoritarian control freak who abused his players, including his premier quarterback, Tom Brady. His style has become outdated. Since he and the Patriots parted ways last year, no team has hired him.
Recently, Burke Robinson, a Stanford University management lecturer, helped the San Francisco 49ers to winning records with a new collaborative formula. This approach emphasizes the collective embrace of collaboratively defined core values and principles that provide a precise sense of direction.
Read MoreAMANPOUR: And next, Rhiannon Giddens is currently carving out her own impressive legacy. She's the singer, songwriter, banjo player, fiddler, and actress who keeps adding strings to her bow. "You're the One" is her latest release and her first full album of original songs. She won the Pulitzer Prize in music for her opera "Omar," and she's been on a global tour with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road ensemble. Now, she's joining Walter Isaacson to discuss her unstoppable career.
Read MoreSpeech is more than just about factuality. [Effective activists] try to point (people) to actual circumstances in their communities that ... the local community sees. ... You switch the vocabulary up to avoid the expressions that are connected with polarization... One goal of politics, a political strategy, is to infuse more and more words with this kind of identity.
So, as soon as your political opponent uses one of those words, in this case, climate change, people's minds shut off. So, they group people into groups and people don't listen to the arguments... The vocabulary affected policy... It justified treating children in terrible ways
Read MoreDear ChatGPT:
What is materialism?
Materialism is a philosophical belief or worldview that holds that matter and physical processes are the fundamental components of reality. In other words, materialism asserts that the material world is the only reality, and that everything can be explained in terms of physical entities and processes.
Materialism can also refer to an emphasis on material possessions and physical comfort over spiritual or intellectual values. This sense of the term is often used in a critical or pejorative sense, suggesting that materialism leads to a shallow or superficial lifestyle.
Read MoreBy Michael Johnson
In his opening to his interview with Eva Jablonka, David Sloan Wilson, a leading figure in evolutionary science, framed the interview in a way that situates the place of cultural evolution in the history of our species:
One of the most mind-expanding books that you’ll ever read is Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. They remind us that evolution is about variation, selection, and heredity, not genes. Genes provide one mechanism of heredity but there are others, including epigenetic mechanisms, forms of social learning found in many species, and forms of symbolic thought that are distinctively human. They provide a concise history of why evolutionary theory became so gene-centric during the 20th Century and how it needs to be expanded to include the other three dimensions. (Emphasis added.)
“Not genes!” What kind of evolution is that!
Like everything else in human life, evolutionary thinking evolves. A key development since the late 20th century is the deeper understanding that genes is only one mechanism for human evolution. In the quote above “symbolic thought” refers to culture. That is, culture is a form of heredity as is epigenetics, social learning and genes. For many of us this is a paradigm shift. I for one grew up embodying and understanding that evolution is all about passing on and changing genes.
That it’s being far more than that, I have come to realize, is quite liberating and empowering. The meaning of culture becomes far more than something we are stuck with after our first five years. It also becomes far more than art, music, literature, etc. Rather, we become able to see it having a major hand in shaping everything human, as the source of the survival of every single human being as well as their thriving, and as the producer of the most scaled and powerful form of social cooperation and that is still evolving. It is at the core of everything human, the worst and the best of us.
I want the world to change in ways that can enable it to work better in support of life, joy, love, and creativity. At the same time we have taken ourselves to precipice of doing enormous damage to every form of life across our Earth, including ourselves. At no point in our history has it been as necessary as now to learn how to use our cultures so that they serve, more and more, the welfare of life, and damage it less and less. I believe this makes understanding how culture works muy importante. So I am quite grateful to help provide the information about cultural evolution in this section of the Americans for Humanity website.
Read MoreBy Larry Walker
Self-serving, dishonest, unethical, illegal, full-blown corruption fuels the System — publicly, right before our eyes. We’ve seen the headlines, the articles, the statistics — and seem to “sigh and turn away” as it has all become “normal.”
Here’s a list of past and current actions that would be less acceptable if only we labeled them as corrupt. You could add more. The longer the list, the greater the need for reform.
Read MoreBy Michael Powell
…Yet the phrase is deeply contentious. Influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor, have embraced it, seeing in white supremacy an explanatory power that cuts through layers of euphemism to the core of American history and culture. It speaks to the reality, they say, of a nation built on slavery. To examine many aspects of American life once broadly seen as race neutral — such as mortgage lending or college faculty hiring — is to find a bedrock of white supremacy.
“It is not hyperbole to say that white supremacy is resting at the heart of American politics,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton, a socialist activist and professor of African-American studies, said in a speech in 2017.
But some Black scholars, businessmen and activists — on the right and the left — balk at the phrase. They hear in those words a sledgehammer that shocks and accuses, rather than explains. When so much is described as white supremacy, when the Ku Klux Klan and a museum art collection take the same descriptor, they say, the power of the phrase is lost…
Read MoreCulture for humans is like water for fish. It surrounds, supports, and permeates. It’s so ever-present it can almost be invisible, forgotten, ignored. Common knowledge, arts, beliefs, and practices are part of a nation’s environment. A nation’s culture shapes its people. A shared worldview, attitudes, values, morals, goals, and customs — its way of life — stabilizes a society. Understanding people requires understanding their culture.
Read More