- David S. Reynolds in NYRB: “Already in the nineteenth century observers were pointing out the growing importance of visual media and their ability to alter how people focus their attention. The old worry that images might compete with words now seems almost quaint: the ‘rage for pictures’ identified in 1848 has not lessened; it has grown exponentially, taking new forms and reaching new heights, and images dominate the cultural scene now more than ever before. The more urgent question is what occurs when visual media become the main way we connect with the world. Images provide immediacy and accessibility, but they can also oversimplify and diminish experience. By giving in to their charm, we risk losing not only the depth that comes with sustained reading but also the habits of thinking that such reading encourages.”
- Tips and tricks from a Jeopardy contestant: “I first took the show’s online contestant test in middle school, and when I was 18, my dad drove me to my first in-person audition in a hotel ballroom in Raleigh, North Carolina. (“Total success,” I wrote on Instagram, incorrectly.)”
- “We are witnessing the return of a politics of morality organized around the injustices of the economic system and an array of related problems: the costs of technological change, the unraveling of community, civil rights, and financial and work-balance issues confronting families,” writes EJ Dionne.
- Height is a salient determinant of body image among adolescents, independent of body mass, a new NBER working paper by Syracuse economists argues.
- LC-MS runoff!