A cold war river that just keeps on keeping on

A cold war that just keeps on keeping on

It is now 30 years since the USSR ceased to be. The end of the Cold War was to herald an era of peace, harmony and the ‘end of history.’
Instead, we have wars, inequality, economic crisis, climate catastrophe and pandemic.

The Cold War had a certain logic to it. There were ideological differences. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there are no ideas beyond capitalism, nationalism, and the pursuit of power.

Cold War Rivers

A 30-Hour, Three-Day Theatre Piece Staged On A Three-Ton Ice Block Suspended Over Sydney Harbor

The work, titled Thaw and conceived by physical theatre company Legs on the Wall and Alaskan composer Matthew Burtner, "features an acrobatic performer balancing, grasping and watching her frozen home melt away." (Yes, it's about climate change.) - The Sydney Morning Herald

Meet a former probation officer who quit after 12 years because the ‘mental exhaustion and stress’ became too much: ‘I needed to achieve some kind of level of happiness for myself’

1. “Once you recognize the role that the mind plays in investing things with meaning and with reality, then it’s easier to to invest virtual things with meaning, just as much as one can invest physical things with meaning” — a conversation with David Chalmers (NYU) at Vox
2. The FBI file on Foucault — and how it relates to his ideas
3. “One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world” — Karl Marx interviewed at 3:16AM
4. “We seem to have strong evidence that we are biased toward explaining failures of human reasoning by positing biases. Let’s call this the ‘Bias Bias’” — thoughts on bias and paradox from Joshua Mugg (Park U.) and Muhammad Ali Khalidi (CUNY)
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6. “The empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis guiding the inquiry” — an interview with philosopher Bernard Reginster & psychologist Joachim Krueger (Brown), who team teach a course on happiness
7. “Even when they deemed it a fable, there was some degree of uncertainty concerning its existence… making it a heuristic tool to understand the nature of plants” — on the scientific & philosophical value of a mythical lamblike animal-plant (via The Browser)
8. Examining utterances that are “always speaking”–most laws, for instance–can help us distinguish different meanings of “meaning” — the Legal-Phi interview blog, run by Lucas Miotto (Maastricht), returns with a conversation with Martin David Kelly (Edinburgh)