Who gets to declare a cultural debate over? According to a recent RNS column, late debate participants, critics, and allies to those directly impacted by the issues being debated are the ones who get to declare differences “unbridgeable” and the debate itself a draw. I find this fascinating, and perhaps you will too. In order: […]
The costs of faking it
“Fake it til you make it” was one of the many mantras of personal development and motivation in the 1980s. It was probably one of the most enduring pieces of poor life advice. “Nosedive,” an episode from the surrealist Netflix series Black Mirror, pushes “faking it” to the limit. Whereas in our reality, economic credit […]
Contradicting our co-authors
I recently told a friend and client that we couldn’t afford to give up on people who’re different from us. Even if we don’t like each other, don’t understand each other, and our antipathy is entirely mutual, our destinies are tied and we can’t afford not to care. We live on the same planet, there […]
Suppressing the natural
At the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, visitors learn about Native dance, art, history, and modern culture. It’s a two-floor archive and represents thousands of years of Native contributions to the Americas. A recurring theme across the exhibits is colonial religions suppressing Native ceremony. Everywhere their boats took them, European […]
Perceiving too little
Sometimes it’s not so much that we’re wrong. It’s that we perceive too little. We can harp on simple answers when we’d benefit more from deep study, or fixate on the footnotes when we’d be better off accounting for the people living out our theories (or even living well despite them). Unprotected Texts, one of the […]
Worlds Apart: The Incommensurability Problem
When I was about 7 years old, my brother had a series of children’s songs on cassette tape. One of the songs included this chorus: Danke schön, mein Herr! Danke schön, danke schön! Thank you, my King— For life is so wunderschön! The problem? I didn’t yet speak German. So what I heard instead was […]
