"If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria."

Friedrich Nietzsche died at 56 (1844-1900)

Nude pizza at Villa with Colm who tends to stir memories of the Royal stories

Oh Sullivan & Cromwell Plans Vigilant Hiring Checks After Protests Bloomberg.

MT and Inc Kitchen by Mike

“Any surprising results scientists achieved, whether they supported or challenged a previous assumption, were seen as the ultimate source of aesthetic pleasure” — Milena Ivanova (Cambridge) on the role of aesthetics in science

“I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an academic philosopher. Not in this world.” — Nathan J. Robinson on the immorality of philosophy in a time of crisis

A 47-Year Old Lawyer Dies. Is Big Law To Blame?

Why Bigger Increasingly Means Better In US Banking Investopedia

Fund manager indicates Jim Biden was in business with Qatari officials POLITICO

Apple in talks with OpenAI to integrate AI into iPhones: Report Interesting Engineering

WILL HUMAN SOLDIERS EVER TRUST THEIR ROBOT COMRADES? IEEE Spectrum
Healthcare?
Medscape severs ties with tobacco industry after backlash over $3M Philip Morris International deal

The Battle for Attention

New Yorker [unpaywalled] – “How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age?Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue.

Clinical presentations of attention problems have climbed (a recent study of data from the medical-software company Epic found an over-all tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children), and college students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way.

Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020. A study conducted in 2004 by the psychologist Gloria Mark found that participants kept their attention on a single screen for an average of two and a half minutes before turning it elsewhere. These days, she writes, people can pay attention to one screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds. “Attention as a category isn’t that salient for younger folks,” Jac Mullen, a writer and a high-school teacher in New Haven, told me recently.

“It takes a lot to show that how you pay attention affects the outcome—that if you focus your attention on one thing, rather than dispersing it across many things, the one thing you think is hard will become easier—but that’s a level of instruction I often find myself giving.” It’s not the students’ fault, he thinks; multitasking and its euphemism, “time management,” have become goals across the pedagogic field.

The SAT was redesigned this spring to be forty-five minutes shorter, with many reading-comprehension passages trimmed to two or three sentences. Some Ivy League professors report being counselled to switch up what they’re doing every ten minutes or so to avoid falling behind their students’ churn. What appears at first to be a crisis of attention may be a narrowing of the way we interpret its value: an emergency about where—and with what goal—we look…”

A restaurant in Italy offers free bottles of wine to customers who hand in phones