Anand Giridharadas: The New India

Anand Giridharadas, child of Indian parents who immigrated to the United States, returns to live in India as an adult. He encounters a culture shifting from traditional and collective values to a me-centric individualism. Giridharadas asks if the “American Dream” is better represented in places like the New India, rather than in our own increasingly calcified class system with limited upward mobility.

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Hot or not? Dan Ariely on attractiveness, pain, and adaptation

Adaptation is the basic idea that we get used to stuff and interpret signals. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely explores how these types of signals relate to pain and social adaptation. How does our previous exposure to pain alter how we experience it now? How is it that we all appreciate the pinnacle of beauty in the same way, but we’re drawn to partners with a level of attractiveness similar to our own?

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Emotionally vague with Orlagh O'Brien

Designer Orlagh O’Brien gave a simple emotion-specific quiz to a group of 250 people. Asking respondents to describe five emotions – anger, joy, fear, sadness, and love – in drawings, colors, and words, O’Brien ended up with a set of media she used to create Emotionally}Vague, an online graphic interpretation of the project’s results.

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Robert Guest : The Power of AMerica to Attract Talent

Robert Guest writes the Lexington column in the Economist. “I’m going to talk,” he says, “about America and why I think it is uniquely positioned to be not merely the current superpower but the next superpower. I’m going to focus on one very narrow aspect of this. America’s greatest strength, in my view, is that people want to live here. That’s something that the people who already do live here take for granted” — maybe because we haven’t visited the other countries of the world and seen how much they suck?

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Juan Enriquez: The Stars & Stripes Forever?

The stars and stripes forever? Futurist and author Juan Enriquez isn’t sure of that. He cites a long history of borders, countries and flags that have changed, and warns the United States isn’t immune. 

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Erin McKean on Wordnik

Self-proclaimed word geek Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of U.S. Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, is on a mission to debunk common misconceptions and elevate the use—and cool factor—of dictionaries. And what’s this about dictionaries being “the vodka of literature”?

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Doug Rushkoff on Renaissance Prospects

Douglas Rushkoff analyzes, writes and speaks about the way people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He sees "media" as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and "literacy" as the ability to participate consciously in it.

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Robert Neuwirth: Squatter Cities

Having spent two years living in squatter communities across four continents, urban ethnographer Robert Neuwirth finds people living lives of complexity, challenge, and surprising resiliency.

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Suketu Mehta: Mumbai

Writer Suketu Mehta glimpses our possible urban future through the lens of the vastly contrasting lifestyles in Mumbai, the biggest, fastest, richest city in India, and with a population of 21 million, larger and more crowded than many nation states.

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K. David Harrison: The rapid erosion of languages

There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world. This, argues linguist K. David Harrison, represents the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled - but it’s rapidly eroding, and this will be terrible. We’re not only losing information, but we’re losing ways of understanding the world.

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