Do we need props?
Some find our increased reliance on mental prosthetics troubling. Will a generation that can google everything, everywhere, grow up unable to remember anything?
ReadTag: Self & identity
Watch what you tweet
I don’t think we can maintain a strict division between personal and professional life any more. The boundaries are blurring because we quite rightly no longer accept that business is business, and nothing more.
ReadThe Shrink & The Sage meet Ranulph Fiennes
Fiennes’s inner psyche appears to be not so much a closed book as a blank page. It’s not that Fiennes, now 70, isn’t a charming and engaging conversationalist. It’s just that he doesn’t appear to do introspection and says he’s bad at “hypotheses or inward-looking philosophy”. Ask him a question that invites him to look inwards, and he answers it with a story about something he has done. It is as though for him Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the active and contemplative life is absolute.
ReadHow should we present ourselves?
Too often we think only about what we want to say, and not enough about how we are likely to be heard and understood.
ReadRadicalisation is not brainwashing
What is terrifying is the idea that anyone could have their free will neutralised by nefarious agents of evil. But what is reassuring is that this means these young men have not freely chosen their path, for reasons they believe to be good. This reassurance, however, is false. Radicalisation is not brainwashing and we cannot counter it if we pretend it is.
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