All posts tagged: Thinking

Does a Decline in Reading Mean a Decline in Thinking?

Does a Decline in Reading Mean a Decline in Thinking?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Late last month at The Spectator, literary editor Sam Leith noted that “Even popular books are getting shorter and easier to read: their sentences are shorter, their paragraphs are shorter.” He also recounted a revealing anecdote: Image Credit: akarawit – Adobe Stock It reminds me of something I heard the novelist Sebastian Faulks say not long ago – how when he found himself at a dinner surrounded by “prosperous and accomplished twentysomethings” he heard one say: “I don’t think I could read a whole book. Maybe a chapter, but not a whole book.” Even the educated so-called elites, the people we expect to be not only reading but pressing books on their children, are losing the habit. That likely bespeaks a market/social/evolutionary pressure: you no longer need to read to succeed. “The real reason kids are giving up reading,” September 28, 2026 He’s not alone in his assessment. At The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch tells us that “The End of Reading Is Here”: Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they …

The Other Way AI Impairs Our Thinking

The Other Way AI Impairs Our Thinking

Published by Daniella Wilson

AI’s tendency to erode our attention spans has been clear for some time. Letting the technology shoulder the burden of thought atrophies our ability to sustain mental effort. I see this all of the time in the undergrads I teach. The remedy, as I tell them, is to embrace exertion and keep our cognitive muscles active. But suddenly, AI has started sapping people’s concentration in a new way, one that feels much harder to combat. In the past week, consulting virtually any major news source—not to mention social media—has meant confronting the prospect of an AI apocalypse. Using AI has already diminished many people’s capacity to focus, work, and think; worrying about AI is making the problem worse. I’m no exception. The tipping point came on September 8. That evening, a young researcher named Jacob Coxon posted on X about his decision to quit his job at Anthropic. Both Anthropic and OpenAI, where he’d also worked, are “gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote. Their models “will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize …

I wasn’t thinking, “I’m going to build an archive”

I wasn’t thinking, “I’m going to build an archive”

Published by Jenni Sidey

Guadalupe Rosales is the author of East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood, out today from One World. She is also the artist behind the archival projects “Veteranas and Rucas” and “Map Pointz,” about Latinx history in L.A. Below, she discusses her approach to documenting Latinx communities. (Photo credit: Fabian Guerrero.) When I started writing East of the River, I found myself returning to the same kinds of things I had been collecting and thinking about for years: photographs, love letters, party flyers, handwritten notes, and all the objects we hold onto without necessarily thinking of them as history. I left Los Angeles for New York in 2000 and lived there for more than a decade before moving back home in 2016. Being away made me cherish everything connected to LA, from the stories we shared to the little material things we managed to hold onto. I began to see photographs and letters as more than documents. They could carry a place, a person, a whole memory. In the years before I …

The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking

The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking

Published by Daniella Wilson

Greta Thunberg was detained last month in Germany, during a sit-in at a munitions factory that sells weapons to Israel. She was wearing a Yalla Intifada T-shirt. Perhaps you thought Thunberg was a climate activist. She used to be. Thunberg gained fame by warning that greenhouse-gas emissions posed a threat to human life so urgent and existential that the world must put aside trifling concerns to solve it immediately. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is,” she told the World Economic Forum in 2019. But someone else will have to put out the fire, because these days, Thunberg is possibly the planet’s most famous anti-Israel protester. Much of the climate movement—particularly its most radical elements—has pivoted to Palestine. The Climate Justice Alliance, Extinction Rebellion, and Climate Defiance, among other green organizations, participate regularly …

Aesthetic and Efficient – A Way of Thinking by Devsingh Balan

Aesthetic and Efficient – A Way of Thinking by Devsingh Balan

Published by Jenni Sidey

Most books about design begin in a studio. This one begins beside a chipped cup you have stopped noticing, a chair you once moved three feet to the left, and a door handle worn pale by every hand that reached for it before yours. Aesthetic and Efficient: A Way of Thinking by Devsingh Balan opens with a claim so quiet you almost miss its ambition: you already know good design when you feel it, and nobody had to teach you. The rest of the book spends forty chapters and seven movements proving that claim, patiently, from termite mounds to temple stone to the software running underneath your day. This is the closing volume of A Trilogy of Contemplation, following Journey to Infinity Within and The Inward Quest. The first book turned attention inward, toward the self. The second carried that attention into leadership and the rooms where people meet. This third book completes the arc by aiming the same stillness at the physical world: what we make, what we keep, what we throw away, and …

How Moments of Awe Unlock Creative Thinking

How Moments of Awe Unlock Creative Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, defines awe as “that goose-bumpy sensation that we get in the presence of something profound: something greater, more powerful, or more eternal than ourselves. It arises when we encounter things that challenge our sense of what’s normal or possible.” In my research for a recent book, I had the opportunity to touch the bark of a tree more than 5,000 years old, to kayak through a congress of resplendent bald cypresses, to watch a magnificent dance of leaves in an old-growth forest, and to observe a blood-red sunrise over a grove of aspens. Each was awesome; each was an experience that engaged my senses, stimulated my creative instincts, and propelled my fingers across a computer keyboard faster than I thought possible. My imagination was truly energized! Let’s examine that connection. What the Research on Awe Says A research review reveals several studies that have either examined the relationship between awe and creativity or identified mechanisms (such as curiosity and cognitive flexibility) that underscore this …

The pressures pushing America toward short-term thinking

The pressures pushing America toward short-term thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

In the wake of World War II, the United States helped establish a world order designed to ensure long-term global stability. Today, that order, and the long-view posture that built it, appear to be eroding. Not only are American-led global institutions withering, U.S. policy — both domestic and foreign — seems increasingly oriented toward achieving short-term goals affected by near-term demands: election cycles, market pressures, and geopolitical crises. Are U.S. leaders “opting out” of long-term thinking? If so, how can we refocus present-day decision-making on the future? To explore those questions, Big Think reached out to Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, which he led from 2003–2023. A veteran American diplomat and national security official, Haass served in a number of senior positions at the White House and the Departments of State and Defense throughout four presidential administrations, most prominently as Special Assistant to President George H. W. Bush. He now writes the influential newsletter Home & Away, where he analyzes American democracy, international developments, and foreign policy. The following interview …

Dining across the divide: ‘I had an idea he was a Tommy Robinson fan and was thinking, Oh my God’

Dining across the divide: ‘I had an idea he was a Tommy Robinson fan and was thinking, Oh my God’

Published by Sam Flores

David, 70, York Occupation Retired modern foreign languages tutor at a university Voting record A mix of Lib Dem and Labour – mostly Labour Amuse bouche He was a Mastermind semi-finalist in 1987. His specialist subjects were the history of the city of York, and the history of the German Democratic Republic, 1949 to 1987 Janus, 42, South Yorkshire Occupation Volunteer hospital radio DJ Voting record English Democrats Amuse bouche He does karaoke any time he can – his song of choice is Riding in the TT Races by George Formby For starters David I was so surprised by Janus. I had an idea he was a Tommy Robinson fan and I was thinking, “Oh my God”, but he was the most gentle, non-confrontational chap you can imagine. Janus I wasn’t nervous. We got on well and agreed on almost everything. David I had fritto misto – fried seafood – then pasta. We shared a bottle of wine and I had a coffee. The food was great, the service attentive and friendly. Janus I had garlic …

A Mystery of Consciousness — Thinking While in a Coma

A Mystery of Consciousness — Thinking While in a Coma

Published by Jenni Sidey

In the Spring/Summer edition of Harvard Medicine, associate editor Molly McDonough offers an article on new findings about consciousness among the comatose. Doctors, she says, can be very surprised when patients who do not seem to respond are found to show hidden awareness. Neurologist Brian Edlow certainly was: Edlow, now a critical care neurologist and an HMS associate professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, remembers the first time it happened. He was a medical student, and his patient, a young man, was unconscious after being hit by a car while riding a bike. The man had been unresponsive for two weeks. But that morning, Edlow grasped the patient’s hand and asked him to squeeze it — and the young man squeezed back. “The Covert Consciousness Dilemma,” That was back in 2006. Edlow was also hearing about Adrian Owen and colleagues’ landmark paper, published in Science, about establishing communication with a patient in a vegetative state. Owen was using an fMRI machine, which detects local changes in blood flow in the brain that often correlate …

Beyond Anxiety Avoidance and Wishful Thinking

Beyond Anxiety Avoidance and Wishful Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

Long ago, I worked with a youngster dreading a class camping trip. When I asked if she had a plan, she said confidently, “Yes, I do.” Surprised, I asked her to share it. “I hope it rains and the trip is cancelled.” We might think—Ah, kids! But substitute in our own fears: that meeting you’re nervous about, the question you don’t want your client to ask, the flight you really don’t want to take, the medical procedure you have put off… and put off again—we understand exactly that teen’s game plan. It’s ours too. We are fingers-crossed hoping against hope to be airlifted out of our discomfort. The emotional pin we drop essentially says: “Don’t!” and we think: “I can’t!” And that “I can’t” describes our relationship with anxiety more broadly: We don’t want to be in one. No, thank you. We wish we could block it or ghost it, but there it is. Understandably, we don’t want to feel trapped in a discomfort corner. So we become proactive—or pre-emptive—and avoid things where anxiety might …