Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that his paradox has at least survived long enough to be quoted and debated in our current age of AI anxiety. Perhaps we should hope against hope that Jevons paradox will prove itself useful all over again.
When we are up against the inevitable limits of human invention and our capacity for patience, it is the music that matters most.
Flattery flattens a person, robbing us of complexity and crippling our will and ability to exchange and understand truths—even the hard ones—we might gain from others.
The War Game and Threads have no time for dramatic trifles of characters dealing with nuclear war from afar, or even the relative safety of a military bunker. Instead, both films plunge us deep into their dreaded, adrenaline-soaked horrors.
Should we not be grateful that companies care enough to hire skilled graphic designers educated in the ways of soft-selling via design and color, and not the bark of street hawkers?
(Photo by Marcus Loke via Unsplash) People in their late teens and early twenties are prone to conversational silence around most adults, their parents included. But there is an easy way around this reticence if you want to get to know them better: Just peek into their…
Are we too afraid to admit that other people are just boring compared to the internet? Are we too timid to say that what we really want is a “party” redefined, reformulated, or done up some other way?
If any single contradiction defines us as Americans, it is that we are gluttons for the spectacle of team sports, but for the most part we starve ourselves of individual exercise. Our nation’s high schools abound in football and basketball teams as social and civic…
‘The Knick’ is both an homage to physicians and medical researchers of the past, even those wildly wrong but well-meaning. Above all, it is a portent of what we stand to lose when we cannot, or refuse to, remember all that our modern medical establishment was built on a foundation of trial, error, and incredible suffering and loss of life.‘‘
The first anniversary of the July 13, 2024, attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump landed with all the grace of a brick hurled through a living room window. Few of Trump’s critics dared to comment on it then, except to say that political violence in the…
There is no use pretending you are someone special when, in fact, you are just another person passing through. So look hard at that tacky framed print on the wall. Heft your Gideon Bible. Scrape your bare feet over the wiry carpet. Turn on the TV screen lodged just two feet from the edge of your bed. Tune out, and join the thousands of invisible hands of everyone else before you who also felt alien, alone, or maybe even a little bit alive in that very same room.
When contemplating travel, we cannot help but think big: London, Paris, or—why not?—even flights to Australia and New Zealand lasting more than a whole day’s time. It is those magical interstices just within reach we tend to forget, the local gems just across the way that, once taken in, might blow our minds in ways so subtle we do not at first recognize them.