The Top 5: Diet culture, loneliness, cosmology, brain tracking, and report cards
Plus, catch up on the Wear We Are podcast
Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week
“The Loneliest Crowd” (National Affairs)
Because Ian Marcus Corbin investigates what we actually mean by “loneliness” and why it is so damaging to individuals and the broader social fabric of a society. “Whether experienced in a small concrete cell or a crowded home, loneliness disrupts our ability to think in a clear, focused way and to regulate our behavior. Both of these capacities are primary building blocks for human agency, and both lean directly on evaluative assumptions. Focused attention is necessarily exclusive — I cannot be equally aware of everything at once; I concentrate on things I find important, desirable, etc. Self-regulation, for its part, must be undertaken in pursuit of some important goal. If I can't hold stable in my mind a sense of what is valuable and important, maintaining constant pursuit of a goal or an ethos will be more difficult. Thus, our evaluations are the feature of world-tending most vulnerable to the world-decaying powers of loneliness.”
“The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel” (NYT)
Because of findings from the Webb telescope, “Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.”
“Many American Parents Have No Idea How Their Kids Are Doing in School” (TIME)
Because Jenny Anderson reports “That parents are in the dark about their child’s progress is not that surprising. They are not curriculum specialists, and state standards have changed dramatically in the past 20 to 30 years. The U.S. has 50 definitions of grade level, and what is communicated to parents at two or three meetings a year varies by teacher, school, district and state. Rather than clarify things, Covid-19 made them murkier, with grades put on hold, assessments changing and the assumption that everyone was behind.”
“The Fight for Your Kids’ Brains Has Already Begun” (NYT)
Because Jessica Grose looks at “brain tracking,” a new technology that is being developed and seemingly inevitable. “If kids are already facing disapproval for daydreaming — their attention waning during tasks at hand — and reading thoughts is on the plausible technological horizon, it’s not difficult to imagine a chilling effect on our children’s imaginations. ‘With greater conformity comes a passive acceptance of authority and authoritarianism, either out of fear or in hopes of appearing cooperative, even when that conflicts with one’s own moral compass,’ Farahany writes. ‘Children are particularly susceptible to pressure to conform and so are even likelier to try to redirect divergent thinking for fear of being ostracized.’”
“Freedom” (Mockingbird)
Because Jane Grizzle observes “Our bodies, diet, nutrition, exercise, wellness, and health have become less about our creatureliness and more about control. We seem to believe that the brain and consciousness are machines, able to be programmed and managed with simple commands. Words create worlds, and our language indicates a deep division between what we think we can control and what capabilities we actually possess.”
ICYMI on Wear We Are
Episode 79: We discuss “The Great Dechurching”
The Morning Five: September 5, 2023
I started reading because of the story on Diet Culture (the Wegovy craze). But the article you posted on Loneliness was what really got me thinking -- about my own world-tending and the feed-back loop of other trusted minds, especially now that I am newly retired.