50/50

All and all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus his contributions to the creative act. “The Creative Act,” Marcel Duchamp

Jane Jacobs On Privacy

Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but most places you cannot get it. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not–only those you choose to tell will know much about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is [...]

Walser on Boredom

People who get bored are ones who always reckon that something amusing ought to come at them from outside. Boredom is where bad moods are, and where people want things. Jacob Von Gunten, Robert Walser

Movie in Words: Lydia Davis

Representatives of different food product manufacturers try to open their own products. “Idea For a Short Documentary Film,” The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

The Dostoevsky Effect

he never did anything to me, it’s true, but I once played a most shameless nasty trick on him, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky

The Benjamin Franklin Effect

I did not … aim at gaining his favour by paying any servile respect to him but, after some time, took this other method. Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he [...]

Obsolescence

Anne McAndrews, a 21-year-old marketing major at Emerson College in Boston, says she and her friends almost never talk on the phone. “If I were to call someone, it would have to be urgent,” she says. “Otherwise, it’s sort of rude and invasive.” She takes a social-media marketing class to which Sprint has donated 10 [...]

Of Tavi Gevinson

She seems uninterested in attracting attention beyond the fashion world, and has turned down offers to appear on “Oprah,” the “Tonight Show,” and morning news shows. “It’s so cheesy,” she said. “The ‘Good Morning America’ audience–I guess that’s just not a crowd whose eyes I want on me.” “Tavi Says,” The New Yorker

Martin Amis On Addiction

Richard had imagined giving up smoking; and he naturally assumed that man new no hotter hell. Nowadays he had long quit thinking about quitting. Before the children were born he sometimes thought that he might very well give up smoking when he became a father. But the boys wanted to have immortalized his bond with [...]

On Facts

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan [...]

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true. Wikipedia: Confirmation Bias

Negative Capability

when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Letter of 21 December 1817, John Keats

Cognitive Dissonance

An uncomfortable feeling caused by holding contradictory ideassimultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational driveto reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming, and denying. Wikipedia: Cognitive Dissonance

The Dunning–Kruger Effect

A cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. Wikipedia: Dunning–Kruger Effect

Anosognosia

A condition in which a person who suffers disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. This may include unawareness of quite dramatic impairments, such as blindness or paralysis. Wikipedia: Anosognosia