- A detailed article in Aeon on the coming of age of Chinese urban youth and the cultural values separating them from their prior generations. The generation gap can be bizarrely pronounced due to the older generations growing up under the harsh Maoist regime and being surrounded by famine and government-enforced cultural shifts, while the younger generation is in the process of being Westernized, which for the upper classes means embracing luxury goods and the other tenants of a post-subsistence, consumption based economy.
- Keeping with the China theme, here’s a rather strange Vice article on China’s genetic engineering program, the goal of which is to engineer higher intelligence babies, leading to
embryo screening [that] will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation’s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.
- Ralph Nader wrote an op-ed on corporate crime that’s worth a read.
- A designer named Chris Ayers created movie posters based on movies and advertisements for products mentioned in the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest — fun stuff.
- Did you know that during the Cold War the United States had nuclear command center airplanes constantly in the sky? It was called Operation Looking Glass.
- Here’s an article in The New York Times about quantum computing, which could be
taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between — all at the same time.
- Is social media leading to a narcissism epidemic? Wait, give me a minute, I need to update my profile picture.
In Perspective 