Category Archives: Culture

Culture, Essays, Ideas, Medicine

Ideas & Society: ‘Medical Benchmarks And The Myth Of The Universal Patient’


THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE:

When my daughter was ten and a half months old, she qualified as “wasted,” which UNICEF describes as “the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.” My wife and I had been trying hard to keep her weight up, and the classification felt like a pronouncement of failure. Her birth weight had been on the lower end of the scale but nothing alarming: six pounds, two ounces. She appeared as a dot on a chart in which colored curves traced optimal growth; fifteenth percentile, we were told. She took well to breast-feeding and, within a month, had jumped to the twentieth percentile, then to the twenty-sixth. We proudly anticipated that her numbers would steadily climb. Then she fell behind again. At four months, she was in the twelfth percentile. At nine and a half, she was below the fifth.

By revealing how our variable bodies respond to a wide range of environments, it challenges us to rethink universal health benchmarks. These standards inform everything from how we define malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies to how we estimate the risks of growth abnormalities, metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular dysfunction.

Our pediatrician was worried. Ease off the lentils and vegetable smoothies, we were warned; we needed to get more calories into our babe. Ghee, peanut butter—we were to drench her food in these and other fats and wash them down with breast milk and formula. And that’s what we did. When we came back a month later, though, we learned that she had dropped further—and crossed into “wasted” territory.

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Maybe in a decade, the one-size-fits-all curves will give way to standards that recognize the different shapes of different populations, and the advice will shift to match. But, for now, we live in the space between two realities—the numbers on a spreadsheet and the child in our arms. ♦

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Manvir Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, has written for The New Yorker since 2022 on topics including evolution, cognitive science, and cultural diversity. He is the author of “Shamanism: The Timeless Religion.”

Culture, Essays, Society

The Evils Of Rationalism

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (March 14, 2025):

Late last year, when Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, something unexpected happened: A lot of people praised him for his actions, elevating Mangione to the status of secular saint for gunning down a man in cold blood. Both on social-media platforms, where he was hailed as a folk hero, and in person outside the New York City courthouse where dozens if not hundreds of supporters waved “Free Luigi” signs, a disturbingly large number of people seemed to be in agreement with Mangione’s claim, in the three-page manifesto found among his belongings, that “frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”

Mangione’s views aren’t simply run-of-the-mill anti-capitalist rantings. They are grounded in part in the principles of the so-called Rationalist movement. Like many Rationalist (also called Gray Tribe) enthusiasts, Mangione is from a wealthy family, has an advanced degree, and has worked in the tech industry. He shares with the Gray Tribe an obsession with AI and some of ideas that the progression of artificial intelligence has brought to the fore.

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Similarly, a culture that embraces the idea that anything is fluid—even one’s own physical body or biological sex or even one’s reality—has a hard time making the case for limits. What comes to take the place of that case is an understanding of the world that says a man can become a hero for fatally shooting someone he doesn’t even know on a New York City street corner. Right now, it may go by the name of Rationalism, but it’s something older and deeper and more terrifying.

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Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Culture, Essays, Social Media

Social Media: Instagram – Is Life Online Real?

YALE REVIEW (March 10, 2025)

Reality is a medium, and I’m thumbing through it. I’m on Instagram, where a video is a “Reel.” I land on an influencer who eats upsetting amounts of food and then runs until he has burned off all the calories. In this video, he eats eleven thousand calories of Taco Bell and then runs eighty-plus miles across thirteen-plus hours, posting a screenshot of his fitness tracker to prove it. He intersperses footage of himself on the toilet, audio included. He has posted dozens of videos using this formula. More than 140,000 people follow him.

What, exactly, is happening to me, my self, and my reality when I scroll on Instagram?

Without Instagram, I never would have seen something like this happen; in fact, it never would have happened at all. It’s a performance conducted by an individual but also the product of billions of human inputs. Our participation on social media as both creators and viewers trains the algorithms that organize their content, and these algorithms shape our tastes in turn. The influencers and the feeds they populate evolve together, recursively.

In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun.

We are not even two decades into a vast, largely unregulated experiment in human psychology. This blur of experience, a composite of varied partial glimpses, is not something I or any of us evolved to digest. All these people, all these loops. I think of my baby nephew. Even in our one-to-one conversations on FaceTime, we inevitably shape his expectations of the real, setting a baseline for his neuroplastic brain that’s so tremendously different than mine. In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun. Reality doesn’t merely exist; reality reels. My nephew will never know otherwise.

I’m haunted by that video of the runner. I thumb back up to find it, pop over to his profile. I see that in his more recent videos, he has begun challenging friends and strangers to eat-offs: a new shape for the performance. I’m grossed out and keep watching. I should know better, but I can’t help myself.

Jesse Damiani is a writer, curator, and foresight strategist. He hosts the Urgent Futures podcast and writes the Reality Studies newsletter.

Culture, Essays

‘The Commitment To Collaborate’ (Essay)

AEON (February 22, 2025): Every week at the office, you and your fellow employees have meetings to discuss progress on group projects and to divide tasks efficiently. Perhaps in the evening, you go home and cook dinner with your partner. At least once in your life, you might have seen a team of firefighters work together to extinguish a fire at a burning house and rescue those inside. You have probably also witnessed or participated in political demonstrations aimed at bettering the treatment of those in need. These are all examples of human cooperation toward a mutually beneficial end. Some of them seem so commonplace that we rarely think of them as anything special. Yet they are. It is not obvious that any of the other great ape species cooperate in such a way – spontaneously and with individuals they have never before met. Though there has been some evidence of cooperation in other great apes, the interpretation of studies on ape cooperation has also been contested. In the human case, cooperation is unequivocal.

One crafts a spear head, the other crafts a shaft. To do so, they need some means of communicating

The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? You might say that none of these examples is costly; they all benefit the person cooperating as well as the recipient of the cooperation. This is true, but there is still a puzzle to solve. If I can reduce the cost of cooperating by deception – pretending to pull my weight in the group project or in the rescue mission – and still reap the benefits, why would I not do so? This is known as the ‘free-rider’ problem.

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Saira Khan is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol in the UK, working on Samir Okasha’s Representing Evolution project.

Book Reviews, Culture, Reviews, The Arts

“Leonardo Da Vinci – An Untraceable Life” (2025)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (February 7, 2025): The portrait of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, more exactly the portrait of one Lisa Gherardini, was executed by fits and starts very early in the 16th century. By now it has been seen by billions of people and is regarded as a painting like no other. Many visitors to the Louvre, where the “Mona Lisa” is displayed, must surely go only to see what all the fuss is about.

Some people feel that the sitter’s beauty is perfect, others that her looks are nothing special. There are those who say, thinking perhaps of Nat King Cole’s charming song, that her smile is enigmatic. But a smile without a known reason is scarcely an enigma, a puzzle to be solved. What is enigmatic is the extent of Mona Lisa’s stardom.

Whatever its source, the aura surrounding the “Mona Lisa”—in addition to bringing millions of admission-paying visitors to the Louvre each year—has contributed to the pop superstardom of the painting’s creator. Leonardo is everywhere. The proliferation of biographies and videos, the ill-researched journalism, the pseudo-historical claims, the blockbuster shows, the promotion of newly touted works that may just possibly be unknown Leonardo pieces—all this is the subject of Stephen Campbell’s “Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life.”

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Culture, Essays, Opinion, Social Media

‘Americans Are Trapped In An Algorithmic Cage’

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (February 7, 2025): Shortly before President George W. Bush was reelected, in 2004, an anonymous Bush-administration source told The New York Times, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Those in what the adviser called “the reality-based community” would be left “studying that reality—judiciously, as you will.” Then “we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace.

Arrogant as this declaration was, I now wonder whether it was merely premature. Although Bush won the 2004 election, reality came crashing down rather rapidly—Bush’s agenda failed in Congress, the American people came to view the war in Iraq as needless folly, Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, and the economy tumbled into the Great Recession in 2008, after which Democrats recaptured control of the White House.

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