Category: Media&Culture

Brain, Drugs, Health, History, Media&Culture, PsychologyLeave a comment

Acid media

Fernando Kaskais

Courtesy the DEA . All other images supplied by the author. How perforated squares of trippy blotter paper allowed outlaw chemists and wizard-alchemists to dose the world with LSD Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco, US. His books include Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s (2019) and Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024). First synthesised in 1938 but not tasted until 1943, acid is essentially a creature of the postwar era. As such, it enters the human world alongside an explosion in consumer advertising, … Continue reading Acid media

Ásia, Media&Culture, Politics, RacismLeave a comment

India and indigeneity

Fernando Kaskais

Kuki women attending a protest in Churachandpur District in the northeastern state of Manipur, India, 22 July 2023. Photo by Adnan Abidi/Reuters In a country of such extraordinary diversity, the UN definition of ‘indigenous’ does little more than fuel ethnic violence B y Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati – is a PhD student in socio-legal anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. In early May 2023, a video surfaced on social media of a mob of young men parading two naked women. With the women’s faces, bosoms and genitalia blurred, the boys could be heard chastising them: ‘Your men raped our women, … Continue reading India and indigeneity

Living, Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

What is ‘lived experience’?

Fernando Kaskais

Ranchers face off with the Bureau of Land Management in a dispute over historic public land grazing rights near Bunkerville, Nevada on 12 April 2014. Photo Jim Uruquhart/Reuters The term is ubiquitous and double-edged. It is both a key source of authentic knowledge and a danger to true solidarity Patrick J Casey is assistant professor of philosophy at Holy Family University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Everywhere you turn, there is talk of lived experience. But there is little consensus about what the phrase ‘lived experience’ means, where it came from, and whether it has any value. Although long used by academics, … Continue reading What is ‘lived experience’?

Art, Literature, Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name

Fernando Kaskais

Art by Marc Martin from We Are Starlings BY MARIA POPOVA “Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her exquisite manifesto for the magic of real human conversation. Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions … Continue reading The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name

Art, Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

Philosophy is an art

Fernando Kaskais

Still Life with White Jar, Orange and Book (1932-33) by Vilhelm Lundstrøm. Courtesy the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen For Margaret Macdonald, philosophical theories are akin to stories, meant to enlarge certain aspects of human life Peter West is an assistant professor in philosophy at Northeastern University London. ‘Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations.’ This provocative remark comes from the paper ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’ (1953) by Margaret Macdonald. Macdonald was a figure at the institutional heart of British philosophy in the mid-20th century whose work, especially her views on the nature of philosophy itself, deserves to be … Continue reading Philosophy is an art

Living, Media&Culture, Politics, PsychologyLeave a comment

A Free Market Embraces Human Nature

Fernando Kaskais

by Owen Ashworth  Much like the debate around being a glass half full or half empty person, there is split opinion over whether human nature is generally good or bad. Young people are more likely to view human nature as self-serving, unsympathetic, and narrow minded than older generations. In all likelihood, future generations will view each other way more pessimistically than any recent generation before them. The general population’s view on human nature is extremely significant in the political arena since it will have a huge impact on the ideology you assign yourself, plus the methods you choose to spread that ideology. There … Continue reading A Free Market Embraces Human Nature

Brain, Living, Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

Our tools shape our selves

Fernando Kaskais

Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty For Bernard Stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience Bryan Norton is a Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. His research focuses on media and the environment in German romanticism and idealism, in addition to contemporary philosophy, technology and art. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled Planetary Idealism: the Technics of Nature in German Romanticism and editing a volume on Bernard Stiegler with Mark Hansen, titled Negentropic Orientations: Bernard Stiegler and the Future of the Digital. It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital … Continue reading Our tools shape our selves

Big Brother, Matrix, Media&Culture, TechnologyLeave a comment

Some of the Most Popular Websites Share Your Data With Over 1,500 Companies

Fernando Kaskais

Cookie pop-ups now show the number of “partners” that websites may share data with. Here’s how many of these third-party companies may get your data from some of the most popular sites online. Matt Burgess is a senior writer at WIRED focused on information security, privacy, and data regulation in Europe. He graduated from the University of Sheffield with a degree in journalism and now lives in London. Send tips to Matt_Burgess@wired.com. verywhere you go online, you’re being tracked. Almost every time you visit a website, trackers gather data about your browsing and funnel it back into targeted advertising systems, which build … Continue reading Some of the Most Popular Websites Share Your Data With Over 1,500 Companies

Brain, Living, Media&Culture, PsychologyLeave a comment

The magic of the mundane

Fernando Kaskais

Dining on the frontstage. Photo by Martin Parr/Magnum Pioneering sociologist Erving Goffman realised that every action is deeply revealing of the social norms by which we live Lucy McDonald is a lecturer in ethics at King’s College London. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Moral Philosophy and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, among others. Think back to the last time you fell over in a public place. What did you do next? Perhaps you immediately righted yourself and carried on exactly as before. I bet you didn’t, though. I bet you first stole a furtive glance at your surroundings to see if … Continue reading The magic of the mundane

Literature, Media&Culture, Philosophy, PsychologyLeave a comment

Folklore is philosophy

Fernando Kaskais

An illustration from Russian Wonder Tales (1912) by Poet Wheeler; illustrated by Ivan Bilibin. Photo by Getty Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world Abigail Tulenko is a PhD student in philosophy at Harvard University, and a research assistant for the Anansi Story Project at Harvard’s Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab. When not reading folktales, she enjoys photography, cyanotype printmaking, and writing. The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order … Continue reading Folklore is philosophy