Was He Gay?
"To call Michelangelo gay is like calling a Renaissance market a 'shopping mall'—the facts are right, but the valences all wrong."
Thinking Too Much of Thinking
Full working memories do not make for productive people or smart people. They make for anxious and stressed people.
Manufactured Difficulty
Why must 'challenge'—nebulous, polyseminal, functionally decoupled 'challenge'—be deliberately inserted into everyone's educational formation somewhere, somehow?
Am I Less Than?
I am greater than you; you are less than me. This is the source of all human misery.
Night School
Fire provided a new context for social interaction when food was brought to a central site for cooking.
Working Memory and Consciousness
"As far as we know, prior to the emergence of stories the universe contained just two levels of reality. Stories added a third."
Attribution Errors
How can we be sure that culture really is important, compared to genes and individual learning?
The Science of Cultural Evolution
We, in terms of our life on the planet as a species, we need a science of the human species that connects us to the natural world.
Put Up or Shut Up, Maybe
"These organizations are only organizations that survive because people pay money to those organizations."
A Buffered Environment
Are cats conscious? Good question, but one that this article doesn’t even touch—or does it?
A Sense of Place
A great street should facilitate people acting and interacting to achieve in concert what they might not achieve alone.
Give Me a Map, Not a Maze
Without knowledge of alternative stories, we are subject to the showiest memes on offer, and they become the framings under which we operate.
The Composed Curriculum
Without this phase, we will continue to swing between intentions so elevated they cannot guide action and practices so improvised they cannot accumulate meaning.
Always Be Teaching
Knowledge is the only thing that can truly empower successful resistance.
Fusion Is More Powerful Than Fission
Conflict is not fundamental to who we are as humans. It is a byproduct of our more collaborative tendencies.
Fifty Men, a Hundred Years
Socially negotiated meanings can change couldn’t into could and borrowing and reorganizing into Creation itself.
Pul-ease, Madame Glyn
Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin? Or would you prefer to err with her on some other fur?
Use Your Words
Explicit communication is crucial to get beyond our very limited and biased guesses: you cannot read minds—and no one can read yours.
Between Us and Among Us
The phenomena that lie between us and among us are the most beguiling to us. Look there for your dignity.