From Project Syndicate:
With widening inequality fueling populist anger, and AI threatening to displace human labor, Nobel laureate economist Daron Acemoglu of MIT recently sat down with political philosopher Michael J. Sandel of Harvard University to discuss how democracy can be revitalized before the damage becomes irreversible. Their wide-ranging conversation explores the dark side of meritocracy, the limits of markets, the meaning of freedom, and the tightening grip of technology companies on the public sphere.
Transcript here.
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Scott Shambaugh,
In 2014, at a small Stanford University lecture hall, the Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski introduced the crowd of assembled nerds to the idea that a dictionary is not a static document but a living object, constantly updated and remade in response to how people write and speak. In a talk titled “The Dictionary as Data,” Sokolowski emphasized that the editors at Merriam-Webster look to how the general public uses language to guide their work. He shared enticing tidbits, including that xi and za, classic Scrabble words, were popular late-night searches in the online dictionary, and that people regularly look up love ahead of Valentine’s Day. Awed, I wrote in a campus magazine a few days later that “we forget that the dictionary, a seeming bastion of objective reality, is compiled by people who use language, too.”
If you want a surefire way to incite hostility on social media, I suggest flaunting the fact that you work nights and weekends — or complaining about those who do. The sea of humans will suddenly part before you into two angry mobs: the workaholics, who are prepared to sacrifice their lives at the altar of capitalism, and the restaholics, whose highest ideal is slacking off and who seethe with resentment at those ruining the curve. Or so the two groups understand one another. Do we work in order to rest, or do we rest in order to work? Neither answer is very appealing. Working in order to rest sounds like a paraphrase of Freud’s death drive: as though, in an ideal world, we would just be sitting quietly, motionlessly, imitating corpses. Resting in order to work suggests the equally depressing thesis that the goal of a human life is to become a well-oiled cog in some kind of machine, a tool for the use of the leviathan called society. We need to work, because survival demands it, and we need to rest, because work is tiring, but are those two possibilities really exhaustive? Isn’t there a third state — one that we don’t need but freely choose?
The best works by the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck leave you convinced they might vanish from one moment to the next, just as a dream seems to grow sharper right before it ends. For all their winking tints and sinuous linework, the dominant mood is one of bittersweet calm, reminding us that fugacity, when it recurs often enough, eventually achieves a sort of permanence. Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 5, is a fittingly relaxed introduction to the artist, revealing Schjerfbeck’s discreet mastery, one cleverly understated canvas at a time.
NEAR MANAUS, BRAZIL—