Nautilus Magazine: Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too

Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours. [...]

Anyone who reviews his schedule cannot help but notice the creator’s paradox. Darwin’s life revolved around science. Since his undergraduate days, Darwin had devoted himself to scientific collecting, exploration, and eventually theorizing. He and Emma moved to the country from London to have more space to raise a family and to have more space—in more than one sense of the word—for science. Down House gave him space for laboratories and greenhouses, and the countryside gave him the peace and quiet necessary to work. But at the same time, his days don’t seem very busy to us. The times we would classify as “work” consist of three 90-minute periods. If he had been a professor in a university today, he would have been denied tenure. If he’d been working in a company, he would have been fired within a week. [...]

First, the great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately. During deliberate practice, Ericsson explained, you’re “engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improve one’s performance.” You’re not just doing reps, lobbing balls, or playing scales. Deliberate practice is focused, structured, and offers clear goals and feedback; it requires paying attention to what you’re doing and observing how you can improve. Students can engage in deliberate practice when they have a clear route to greatness, defined by a shared understanding of what separates brilliant work from good work, or winners from losers. Endeavors where one can have the fastest time, the highest score, or the most elegant solution are ones that allow for deliberate practice.

Second, you need a reason to keep at it, day after day. Deliberate practice isn’t a lot of fun, and it’s not immediately profitable. It means being in the pool before sunrise, working on your swing or stride when you could be hanging out with friends, practicing fingering or breathing in a windowless room, spending hours perfecting details that only a few other people will ever notice. There’s little that’s inherently or immediately pleasurable in deliberate practice, so you need a strong sense that these long hours will pay off, and that you’re not just improving your career prospects but also crafting a professional and personal identity. You don’t just do it for the fat stacks. You do it because it reinforces your sense of who you are and who you will become.

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The Guardian: The ungrateful refugee: ‘We have no debt to repay’

I don’t believe in that explanation. What actually happened was that we learned what they wanted, the hidden switch to make them stop simmering. After all, these Americans had never thought we were terrorists or Islamic fundamentalists or violent criminals. From the start, they knew we were a Christian family that had escaped those very horrors. And they, as a Protestant community, had accepted us, rescued us. But there were unspoken conditions to our acceptance, and that was the secret we were meant to glean on our own: we had to be grateful. The hate wasn’t about being darker, or from elsewhere. It was about being those things and daring to be unaware of it. As refugees, we owed them our previous identity. We had to lay it at their door like an offering, and gleefully deny it to earn our place in this new country. There would be no straddling. No third culture here.

That was the key to being embraced by the population of our town, a community that openly took credit for the fact that we were still alive, but wanted to know nothing of our past. Month after month, my mother was asked to give her testimony in churches and women’s groups, at schools and even at dinners. I remember sensing the moment when all conversation would stop and she would be asked to repeat our escape story. The problem, of course, was that they wanted our salvation story as a talisman, no more. No one ever asked what our house in Iran looked like, what fruits we grew in our yard, what books we read, what music we loved and what it felt like now not to understand any of the songs on the radio. No one asked if we missed our cousins or grandparents or best friends. No one asked what we did in summers or if we had any photos of the Caspian Sea. “Men treat women horribly there, don’t they?” the women would ask. Somehow it didn’t feel OK to tell them about my funny dad with his pockets full of sour cherries, or my grandpa who removed his false teeth when he told ghost stories. [...]

The refugee has to be less capable than the native, needier; he must stay in his place. That’s the only way gratitude will be accepted. Once he escapes control, he confirms his identity as the devil. All day I wondered, has this been true in my own experience? If so, then why all the reverence for the refugees who succeed against the odds, the heartwarming success stories? And that’s precisely it – one can go around in this circle forever, because it contains no internal logic. You’re not enough until you’re too much. You’re lazy until you’re a greedy interloper.

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RSA: The Populist Revolt

What are the political and moral fault-lines that divide Brexit Britain — and how can we achieve a new settlement that works for everyone?

Several decades of greater economic and cultural openness in the West have not benefited all our citizens.

Founding editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart argues that among those who have been left behind, a populist politics of culture and identity has successfully challenged the traditional politics of Left and Right. He suggests that a new division has been created: between the mobile ‘achieved’ identity of the people from Anywhere, and the marginalised, roots-based identity of the people from Somewhere. This schism accounts for the Brexit vote, the election of Trump, the decline of the centre-left, and the rise of populism across Europe.

Goodhart visits the RSA to reveal how the 'Somewhere' backlash is a democratic response to the dominance of 'Anywhere' interests, in everything from mass higher education to mass immigration.

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Nautilus Magazine: Chimps and the Zen of Falling Water

You can watch a video online, narrated by the great primatologist Jane Goodall, who, as with so many chimpanzee behaviors, was the first to observe these rituals. It’s quite a show: An adult male approaches via the riverbed with a slow, rhythmic gait, so unlike yet like our own. He throws rocks and tree branches into the falls, then catches a vine and swings above them. Finally he sits on a rock in the stream, head resting on forearms, and watches the water go by.

These performances happen several times each year, but they do not have any obvious utilitarian purpose, even as social displays; though groups of chimps sometimes participate, often it’s just a solitary individual. Given how easily a chimp might slip on the rocks, it’s quite risky. Chimps also can’t swim, and typically avoid running water. Which raises the question: What are these chimps thinking? [...]

This would seem to fit with what’s known of monkey cognition: They do think in complex ways, and certainly possess some elaborate interpersonal rituals, but they’re not quite so abstract-minded as chimps. Outside of primates, though, plenty of species have the mental potential. Quite a few cetaceans, for example, including orcas with their remarkable tribal greeting ceremonies. Ditto elephants and their burial rites. Again: we can’t know what they’re thinking, but it’s unscientific not to consider the possibility.  “Perhaps numerous animals engage in these rituals,”  writes ethologist Marc Bekoff in The Emotional Lives of Animals, “but we haven’t been lucky enough to see them.”

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Vintage Everyday: Captured in Color, These 28 Rare and Incredible Photographs Show How Soldiers Lived in World War I

Serving in the French Army, photographers such as Paul Castelnau (1880–1944) and Fernand Cuville (1887–1927) continued the autochromists’ tradition of recording the world around them in great detail. These rare color photographs, were taken in France in 1917, capture what life was like for soldiers away from the fighting on the Western Front

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Jakub Marian: ‘Easter’ in European languages

The English word “Easter” (and similar words in several other Germanic languages) is derived from the name Eostre, a Germanic goddess called *Austrō in Proto-Germanic, and ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂ews-, meaning “dawn” or “east”.

The name (and many of the Easter customs celebrated around the world) may be of pagan origin, but, as we all know, the holiday is primarily a Christian holiday now, and this is reflected in the most common name of the holiday, derived from Latin Pascha, which ultimately derives from the Hebrew holiday Pesach, “Passover” (shown in red in the following map):

The holiday is mostly called either “Big Night(s)/Day(s)” (blue) or “Resurrection of Christ” (green) in Slavic languages. Interestingly, Latvian “Lieldienas” also means “Big Days”, but “Liel-” is not etymologically related to “Vel-” in Slavic languages.

Hungarian húsvét literally means “meat-taking”. Finnish pääsiäinen is derived from the verb päästä, which has many different meanings, one of which is “to escape” or “to be free”, referring to “being free from or finishing Lent”. Estonian ülestõusmispühad means “resurrection holiday”.

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Nautilus Magazine: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Fermi Paradox

Nevertheless, Laughlin outlined at least one possible explanation for the apparent dearth of aliens as smart, or smarter, than us in the universe. It has to do with what can seem like a counter-intuitive result of our technological advance—the “signal leakage” of our communications is becoming more and more scarce, not more abundant. He brought to bear the example of a famous ego: the then-real estate mogul and now-president of the United States.

“If we look at what’s going on, here on Earth, even Donald Trump—one of the most self-promoting guys out there—is making no effort whatsoever to send his message to the stars,” Laughlin said. “He’s not building radio telescopes, he’s not broadcasting lists of his accomplishments to anyone but the people whose opinion he cares about—namely, everybody in the United States. And so, there’s nothing that we’re doing that would lead to our footprint being evident at interstellar distances. Indeed, a lot of the things we’re doing—even as we improve our technology—are leading to less and less of a signal leakage.” Broadcast television and radio leak information about us into the cosmos, but those means of communicating, Laughlin said, “are going away quickly, replaced by transmissions through fiber optic cable.”

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Salon: Donald Trump, Jews and the myth of race: How Jews gradually became “white,” and how that changed America

For most of American history, that wasn’t the case. Jews were a separate race, as blacks and Asians are today. But over time Jews became white, which made it harder for other whites to hate them.

That’s the great elephant in the room, when it comes to the tortured subject of race in America. The word “race” conjures biology, a set of inheritable — and immutable — physical characteristics. But it’s actually a cultural and social category, not a biological one, which is why it changes over time.

Until the 1940s, Jews were recorded as a distinct racial group by American immigration authorities. But many non-Jewish whites also believed that Jews shared traits with the most stigmatized race of all: African-Americans. [...]

For their own part, Jews couldn’t agree if they were a race or not. Some of them warned that a separate racial classification would inevitably link them to blacks, diminishing Jews in the eyes of other Americans. But others held tight to the racial idea, which could help make the case for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

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Forbes: Pope Francis's Welcome To World's Only Openly Gay Prime Minister Rekindles Vatican Controversy

Conspicuous, as well - particularly to the more conservative members of the Catholic Church - was the warm welcome extended  to Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel who was accompanied by his husband, the architect Gauthier Destenay, which for some analysts was  a “powerful message” on the Vatican’s position on gay rights. [...]

“The Vatican has just taken a new step in its forced relativisation of homosexuality, which is what Pope Francis had attempted with the texts of the synod on the family,” Media-Presse, the Catholic information site wrote in an article in which, like other Catholic publications, it uses quotation marks to refer to Bettel’s “husband,” “companion” and “marriage.” [...]

“Francis has not changed church doctrine," the gay publication Advocate wrote.  "Indeed, only the most wildly optimistic would expect him to do so. The Church continues to consider same-sex relationships unequal to heterosexual marriages (and sinful as well) and the concept of gender transition or fluidity as a violation of God’s plan for humanity,” 

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