Court holds that regulation guaranteeing union access to employees is unconstitutionalSCOTUSBlog. Bigger, I think, than the cheerleader case.
Articles of Note
Avaricious, vain, envious, lazy: a previously unknown memoir paints a decidedly unflattering portrait of John Locke... more »
New Books
Pablo Neruda’s memoir is stunningly vain, morally abhorrent, and yet beautifully written. A new version renders it complete — or does it? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The devious Edmund Curll. Nemesis of Alexander Pope, he both pirated the poet’s work and satirized him endlessly ... more »
MEdia Dragon Trends - Make Use Of: “With Google’s ubiquity, seeing what people search for is quite interesting. By looking at trending searches, you can easily find what the hottest topics are, which terms people care about, and gain insight into the minds of internet users. Did you know that Google provides a powerful tool called Google Trends that lets you access and filter through this information with ease? Let’s take a look at Google Trends and see how to find what’s trending right now, plus much more. At its core, Google Trends is a web service that lets you check out what’s trending on Google and see what people search for. While useful for business research, it offers a lot of fun for casual use, too. On the Google Trends homepage, you’ll see some starter examples of topics to explore. These include worldwide interest in the World Cup by country in the past week, and overall interest in the word “cupcake” worldwide since 2004…”
The Very First Case of COVID-19 Was Much Earlier Than We Knew, New Study IndicatesScience Alert (David L). NC has been saying for months that modeling at UCSF ascertained Covid was circulating in October.
First COVID-19 case could have emerged in China in Oct 2019 – study Reuters
St. Vincent Nurses Strike for Safer Patient Care Reaches 105 Days on Sunday Making it the Second Longest Nurses Strike in Massachusetts History Massachusetts Nurses Association. June 29 Town Hall Registration.
‘People don’t want to go back to the same’: Why some think labor crunch isn’t just about payYahoo Finance
Can Interior Design Help Beat the Heat? This House Does It Right Mansion Global. The classism makes my back teeth itch, but there are some interesting tips buried beneath the “signature lived-in, English cottage aesthetic.”
Wild Rice Waters Places Journal
Which living thing is the best ‘mascot’ for long-term thinking? The Long-Termist’s Field Guide
Interview: Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneerNoah Smith, Noahpinion
BJPS Launches “Short Reads”
Are you interested in learning about recent work in philosophy of science but lack the time to read a bunch of articles? Well, a new feature at the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS), “Short Reads,” may be just what you need, and may provide a model for other journals across the discipline. (more…)
“Engineers of the human soul would wish to deal with…evil by suppression; literature, real literature, deals with it through the power of imaginative sublimation” — also, says Justin E.H. Smith, “philosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is”
“The philosophical picture of natural kinds… are not well-suited to the aims of medicine and disease classification” — an interview with Anya Plutynski (Wash. U. St. Louis) on the philosophy of cancer and other questions related to philosophy, science, and medicine
“Whether we frame the relevant decision problems from the perspective of the individual or from an aggregate perspective can make a difference” — Johanna Thoma (LSE) on why the morality of artificial intelligences might rationally differ from the morality of humans
“If speaking our minds is important to developing ourselves as rational creatures, and if such development is at least one important aspect of the good life, then we ought not to sacrifice it willy-nilly at the altar of social status” — Hrishikesh Joshi (Bowling Green) brings together Aristotle and an interactionist account of reason
“There is a switch that can divert the trolley onto another track, away from the bill. But! Lying strapped to that length of track is the filibuster” — the filibuster variant of the trolley problem, from Alexandra Petri (via Kathleen Wallace)
“Maybe in the end numbers will come to seem a little like the way logic as used in the Middle Ages might seem to us today: a framework for determining things that’s much less complete and powerful than what we now have” — have we been tricked by the limits of our epistemology into making mistakes about metaphysics in regards to numbers? (via MR)
“Whatever I knew about masks and vaccines at an intellectual level, violating those expectations still felt wrong” — Evan Westra (York) on the weirdness of going maskless
Gartner: 51% of global knowledge workers will be remote by the end of 2021Brave Search beta now available in Brave browser
- Rembrandt’s Night Watch uncropped by AI 300 years after it was trimmed
- Big data: With great data comes great responsibility
- “Labels Unwrapped” empowers consumers to make more informed food choices
- ABA Section of Legal Education releases first-time report on bar passage data
- Google’s No-Click Searches—Good Or Evil?
- Report – Nearly 900 Secret Service employees got COVID