society

Apparently, Penelope Trunk can write. And she shares some of my opinions. A worthy addition to my echo chamber.

Complete lectures (transcripts and video) from Yale's philosophy class on Death.

I started reading with lecture 23, "How to live given the certainty of death." It was good; I'd like to read the rest when time permits.

Quoted: Complete list of all sessions for PHIL 176: Death.

Higher life expectancy leads to new moral and practical problems.

Quoted: she showed graphs describing the three most common ways that old people die and the trajectory and duration of each scenario

Quoted: “We’re doing this so badly because we’ve never been here before,” Dr. Lynn said. “But the care system we’ve got didn’t come down from the mountain. We made it up, and we can make it up better.”

great article...mumbai--the city of dreams indeed for millions, rich and poor.

Quoted: The residents of Dharavi, allegedly Asia's biggest slum, are thriving in hardship

How industrialists created the consumer culture to keep people occupied. Baa.

It's encouraging to know that there's plenty of room for improvement. Our world is a product of dirty historical conditions, from apes through tyrants to masterminds. We can clean them up to make a better world possible.

Quoted: The urge to buy is as manufactured as the stuff you have heaped in your shopping basket.

Schools are evil, here's why.

Quoted: Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are

An interesting perspective on recent history: industrialization created free time (unused mental capacity or "cognitive surplus"), TV filled it at first but now we are finding more constructive ways to apply it.

Quoted: I started telling [a TV producer] about the Wikipedia article on Pluto...She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

Geneaology is so fascinating.

redot from Arun.

Quoted: This could make for one odd family reunion: Barack Obama is a distant cousin of actor Brad Pitt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is related to Pitt's girlfriend, Angelina Jolie.

I'll be interning this summer with Dr. Yunus and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh!!

Quoted: Provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh without any collateral. At Grameen Bank, credit is a cost effective weapon to fight ...