Interesting Reads for 03 September 2014

Normally, I will post these on Friday, but because we missed last week due to the short week start of school, this week will be Wednesday.

Today’s intellectuals: too obedient? | Features | Times Higher Education – “The responsibility of the intellectuals, however, is hardly being met. Social docility, strong convictions of one’s personal impotence, infinite procrastination, plus, one surmises, the regular protestation that people must be able to get on with their proper job – their research and teaching – these excuses and tendencies prevent our noticing that the end of the world is nigh. So it is likely that the noble and long-standing idea of the university as the redoubt of original and perhaps uncomfortable thought and as the guardian of a nation’s best notions of itself will dissolve and dislimn into a dozen or so busy little enterprises that are narrowly obedient to governmental shopkeepers. Then the slow cataclysm of an elderly and failing economy together with the irresistible destruction of our habitat as nature exacts revenge upon feckless human waste will reduce the citadel of reason to ruins.” Times Higher Education

It’s Still Not the End of History – “Twenty-five years ago this summer, Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history” and the inevitable triumph of liberal capitalist democracy. His argument was simple: Democracy would win out over all other forms of government because the natural desire for peace and well-being set nations on a path to progress from which it was impossible to divert. If a state—even a Communist state—wished to enjoy the greatest prosperity possible, it would have to embrace some measure of capitalism. Since wealth-creation depends on the protection of private property, the “capitalist creep” would invariably demand greater legal protection for individual rights.” The Atlantic

My Own Personal Nothingness – Issue 16: Nothingness – “o understand anything, as Aristotle argued, we must understand what it is not, and Nothingness is the ultimate opposition to any thing. To understand matter, said the ancient Greeks, we must understand the “void,” or the absence of matter. Indeed, in the fifth century B.C., Leucippus argued that without the void there could be no motion because there would be no empty spaces for matter to move into. According to Buddhism, to understand our ego we must understand the ego-free state of “emptiness,” called śūnyatā. To understand the civilizing effects of society, we must understand the behavior of human beings removed from society, as William Golding so powerfully explored in his novel Lord of the Flies.” Nautilus

Seeking Facts, Justices Settle for What Briefs Tell Them – “Kannon K. Shanmugam, a lawyer with Williams & Connolly who argues frequently before the court, said the justices’ quandary was a common one.“The Supreme Court has the same problem that the rest of us do: figuring out how to distinguish between real facts and Internet facts,” he said. “Amicus briefs from unreliable sources can contribute to that problem.”” New York Times

What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet – “Harris is the author of “The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection,” a new book about how technology affects society. It follows in the footsteps of Nicholas Carr, whose “The Shallows” is a modern classic of internet criticism. But Harris takes a different path from those that have come before. Instead of a broad investigation into the effects of constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the “millennial” demographic coveted by advertisers and targeted by new media outlets.” Leo Mirani, Quartz

In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist – “A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Md. middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—”taken in for an emergency medical evaluation” for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace’s Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, according to news reports from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future. “ The Atlantic