4 Dec 2021
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Imagine an enormous, lush rainforest teeming with life…in the Arctic. Well, there was a time — and not too long ago — when the world warmed more than any human has ever seen. (So far)
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Big Think – Oct 8, 2017
How America Got Divorced from Reality: Christian Utopias, Anti-Elitism, Media Circus
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Since a boat of religious fanatics with buckles on their hats hit the shores near Plymouth Rock and claimed that this was their utopia, America has always been a little bit crazy. It’s this kind of wide-eyed “anything can happen if you believe” mentality that, at its best, can produce incredible art. But at its worst, it can be cruel and conspiratorial. We live in a country where people refuse to believe vaccination can help you and where a White House is spinning “alternative — but Kurt Andersen is here to say that this is nothing now. At the time of the Civil War, society had become split by two sides that refused to listen to each other. Back then, the political and social divide is stoked by a hyperbolic partisan media where anyone could publish whatever they wanted in a pamphlet without fact-checking. Sound familiar? It definitely should. Kurt’s latest book is appropriately titled Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire.
KURT ANDERSEN:
Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360 on NPR, is a journalist and the author of the novels Hey Day, Turn of the Century, The Real Thing, and his latest non-fiction book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. He has written and produced prime-time network television programs and pilots for NBC and ABC, and co-authored Loose Lips, an off-Broadway theatrical revue that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles. He is a regular columnist for New York Magazine, and contributes frequently to Vanity Fair. He is also a founder of Very Short List.
Andersen began his career in journalism at NBC’s Today program and at Time, where he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice and for eight years the magazine’s architecture and design critic. Returning to Time in 1993 as editor-at-large, he wrote a weekly column on culture. And from 1996 through 1999 he was a staff writer and columnist for The New Yorker. He was a co-founder of Inside.com, editorial director of Colors magazine, and editor-in-chief of both New York and Spy magazines, the latter of which he also co-founded.
From 2004 through 2008 he wrote a column called “The Imperial City” for New York (one of which is included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2008). In 2008 Forbes. com named him one of The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media. Anderson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, and is a member of the boards of trustees of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Pratt Institute, and is currently Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He lives with his family in New York City.
TRANSCRIPT:
Kurt Andersen: Americans have always been magical thinkers and passionate believers in the untrue. We were started by the Puritans in New England who wanted to create and did create a Christian utopia and theocracy as they waited for the eminent second coming of Christ and the end of days. And in the south by a bunch of people who were convinced, absolutely convinced that this place they’d never been was full of gold just to be plucked from the dirt in Virginia and they stayed there looking and hoping for gold for 20 years before they finally faced the facts and the evidence and decided that they weren’t going to get rich overnight there. So that was the beginning. And then we’ve had centuries of buyer-beware charlatanism to an extreme degree and medical quackery to an extreme degree and increasingly exotic extravagant implausible religions over and over again from Mormonism to Christian Science to Scientology in the last century.
And we’ve had this antiestablishment “I’m not going to trust the experts, I’m not going to trust the elite” from our character from the beginning. Now all those things came together and were super-charged in the 1960s when you were entitled to your own truth and your own reality. Then a generation later when the Internet came along, giving each of those realities, no matter how false or magical or nutty they are, their own kind of media infrastructure. We had entertainment, again for the last couple hundred years, but especially in the last 50 years permeating all the rest of life, including Presidential politics from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Ragan to Bill Clinton. So the thing was set up for Donald Trump to exploit all these various American threads and astonishingly become president, but then you look at this history and it’s…
Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/kurt-ande…
Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/kurt-ande…
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Gresham College – Nov 22, 2021
The Malian city of Timbuktu is one of the world’s oldest seats of learning and has an intellectual legacy of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, coming from three great West African desert empires: Ancient Ghana, medieval Mali, and the Songhai Empire. These manuscripts offer a unique window into their history. Many remain unread. This lecture will look at how their study can be used to advance our knowledge of the intellectual history of the premodern world. A lecture by Robin Walker
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an…
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The company publicly claims its AI is amazing at removing harmful content, but internal documents suggest they know the algorithm is ineffective.
In public, Facebook seems to claim that it removes more than 90 percent of hate speech on its platform, but in private internal communications the company says the figure is only an atrocious 3 to 5 percent. Facebook wants us to believe that almost all hate speech is taken down, when in reality almost all of it remains on the platform.
This obscene hypocrisy was revealed amid the numerous complaints, based on thousands of pages of leaked internal documents, which Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen and her legal team filed to the SEC earlier this month. While public attention on these leaks has focused on Instagram’s impact on teen health (which is hardly the smoking gun it’s been touted as) and on the News Feed algorithm’s role in amplifying misinformation (hardly a revelation), Facebook’s utter failure to limit hate speech and the simple deceptive trick it’s consistently relied on to hide this failure is shocking. It exposes just how much Facebook relies on AI for content moderation, just how ineffective that AI is, and the necessity to force Facebook to come clean.
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New York State Writers Institute– Mar 25, 2013
An interview with Nigerian author Chinua Achebe during a Writers Institute visit in October 1998.
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HistoryVille– Jul 3, 2021
Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe is considered by many critics and experts alike to be one of the most influential African writers of his generation. His books, including the novel Things Fall Apart, have exposed the world’s readers to the imaginative uses of language and form, as well as to the realistic accounts of modern African life and history. Not only through his literary contributions, but also through his promotion of ambitious agendas for Nigeria and Africa, Achebe helped to reshape the understanding of African history, culture, and place in world affairs. Although he won many prizes and awards, Chinua Achebe never won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Why is this so? We shall find out in the course of this video. #HistoryVille #ChinuaAchebe
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HistoryVille– Jul 3, 2021
Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe is considered by many critics and experts alike to be one of the most influential African writers of his generation. His books, including the novel Things Fall Apart, have exposed the world’s readers to the imaginative uses of language and form, as well as to the realistic accounts of modern African life and history. Not only through his literary contributions, but also through his promotion of ambitious agendas for Nigeria and Africa, Achebe helped to reshape the understanding of African history, culture, and place in world affairs. Although he won many prizes and awards, Chinua Achebe never won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Why is this so? We shall find out in the course of this video. #HistoryVille #ChinuaAchebe
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Robert Reich – Nov 3, 2021
Here it is: The full story of wealth inequality in America. The top 1% holds 15x more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. If you’ve never watched a video of mine, please watch this one.
Watch More: Does Trickle-Down Economics Actually Work? ►►https://youtu.be/srJZHQHHT8g
00:00 The Second Gilded Age
01:17 The Basics
03:00 Why the Wealth Gap is Exploding
05:21 Why Wealth Concentration is a Problem
07:10 The First Gilded Age 10:20
How to Reduce the Wealth Gap #ElonMusk #WealthGap #TaxTheRich
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CNET Highlights– Dec 1, 2021
Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen discusses the dangers of the Facebook platform in her opening remarks to Congress.
CBS News – Streamed live on Dec 1, 2021
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress again on Wednesday. Haugen filed complaints with federal law enforcement and told “60 Minutes” in October that in her time at Facebook she saw “conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook.”
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Yahoo Finance – Dec 1, 2021
#Facebook #Facebookwhistleblower #FrancesHaugen #MarkZuckerberg
Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley and Zack Guzman discuss the testimony of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen before Congress.
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Transition Studies 