“Social media is the dark twin of ritual. It never achieves wholeness or closure.” Ted Gioia on the need for rituals in the digital age

13 Observations on Ritual

And other responses to my 'dopamine culture' article

“It’s a bizarre, bizarre thing to ask, to seek to make Yale a tool of equality. The Ivy League exists to reward, foster, and showcase inequality."

One More Time: You Can't Make a Competitive Selection Process "Equitable"

Just briefly.

Announcing #MRathon 2024, a hackathon for increasing MRI accessibility! Join us for socializing (May 2) and hacking (May 3) in the beautiful Jackie Chan Heritage house at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. The hackathon is a collaboration with the ezyMRI NerdFest, big thank you to our local organizers Huang Shaoying and Le Thu Thao! Registration is based on a voluntary donation. $50+ donations get you a VIP ticket to the MRathon Highlights after-party on May 9, celebrating 40 years of the journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Share this post to help us spread the word, and join us by registering or pitching a project at the link below

MRathon 2024

MRI hackathon.

THE WORLD IS 100 TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT!!! The size of the polygons shows the fraction of world debt each country owes. The colors show the debt as a fraction of that country's GDP. The green ones have debt greater than their GDP!

“Height is so socially valuable and so utterly outside of our control that it feels like God invented it to demonstrate the folly of meritocracy.” Freddie de Boer on being weird

weird

My interest today is to carve out some space that barely exists in our narrative culture: weird, but not lonely.

"... what one regulator thinks about bitcoin is irrelevant. I am celebrating the right of American investors to express their thoughts on bitcoin by buying and selling spot bitcoin ETPs." Commissioner Hester M. Peirce on the recent SEC decision:

SEC.gov | Out, Damned Spot! Out, I Say!: Statement on Omnibus Approval Order for List and Trade Bitcoin-Based Commodity-Based Trust Shares and Trust Units

Out, Damned Spot! Out, I Say! : Statement on Omnibus Approval Order for List and Trade Bitcoin-Based Commodity-Based Trust Shares and Trust Units C...

"The truth hidden below the surface of the story is a hard one: Nothing makes any sense. We do not get what we deserve. If we are lucky, we get more. If we are unlucky, we get less [...] That's the system." Roger Ebert on the one thing we all talk about

Roger Ebert

13 Conversations About One Thing movie review (2002) | Roger Ebert

Happiness is the subject of "13 Conversations About One Thing." For that matter, happiness is the subject of every conversation we ever have: the s...

"I will never understand why our culture grew so obsessed with mental illness and depression and so contemptuous towards people who wanted to put those things into art, to give everyone a way to feel them."

An Ode to "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die"

“I Hate Myself and Want to Die” is the name of a Nirvana song, first released (funnily enough) on the big Beavis and Butthead compilation album.

“I don’t need to do anything to deserve the truth. The truth is not deserved. That is not how the truth works.” Freddie DeBoer about the price of being ostracized

What Purpose Do I Serve in Your Life?

Recently I wrote a piece about the cramped cliches that afflict so many female characters in movies and shows, mostly written by men.

'[The] screenwriting lacks a shade in clarity, but then, so do the lives of these characters.' Roger Ebert about Bellflower, a mumblecore rom-com with flamethrowers

Roger Ebert

Flame-throwers as a hobby movie review (2011) | Roger Ebert

"Bellflower" is a scrappy indie movie that comes out of nowhere and blows up stuff real good. It also possibly represents the debut of a one-of-a-kind

“They’re looking out so far in the distance, they don’t even see the blood or corpses." Ted Gioia on the dangers of effective altruism

Why I Ran Away from Philosophy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried

Or how flawed thinking can make $10 billion disappear

Some wisdom from Jeff Smith's Bone

An unrecognizable Ricky Gervais, back when he was a musician

"Or maybe it's a tripleheader: Maybe the environment is poisoned, and the group is phony, and Carol is gnawing away at her own psychic health. Now there's a fine mess." Roger Ebert on Todd Haynes' "Safe", a subversive take on our modern illnesses

Roger Ebert

Safe movie review & film summary (1995) | Roger Ebert

You don't always notice it, but during a lot of the scenes in "Safe" there's a low-level hum on the soundtrack. This is not an audio flaw...

We will only publish one research article this year. This is the one!

Crowdsourcing the research article of the future

I will only publish one research article this year. This is the one!

Glyn Johns' testimony about Let it be closely matches the story told in Peter Jackson's Get Back

People.com

Getting Back to 'Get Back': The Long and Winding Saga of Glyn Johns' Lost Beatles Album

The legendary producer's original version of the Beatles' swan song is finally available after more than 50 years in the vault.

"They love humanity as an abstraction but despise it in the flesh."

On Having Children

The Most Private Choice We Make Has Potent Public Consequences

Our answer to the question of reproducibility, transparency and innovation in academic publishing 42 co-authors, 94 datasets from 18 sites, 5 interactive figures and an award-winning dashboard, all bundled in our most ambitious NeuroLibre preprint yet. Check it out at the link below!

2020 T1 Reproducibility Challenge

We are getting ready to unleash our science fantasy during the second Science for kids conference!

Libra-net (15): The second Science for Kids conference

Getting ready to unleash our science fantasies. Donations greatly appreciated!

We poured our heart and soul in this two-minute video summarizing our Science for Kids initiative. Big thank you to the marketing agency Publicis for making the video and to the band Bei the Fish for providing the soundtrack!