Analyses of ghostwritten articles shows them to both exaggerate effectiveness and downplay adverse effects.
Capitalism has been a form of enchantment, a metamorphosis of the sacred in the raiment of secularity. With money as its ontological marrow, it represents a moral and metaphysical imagination as well as a sublimation of our desire for the presence of divinity in the everyday world.
This was the nightmare of scientific progress: The truths of today would become the falsehoods—or at least the errors—of tomorrow.
The invisibility of embedded science is an apparently paradoxical, but reliable, index of the significance of science for everyday life—for government, for commerce, and, not least, for our sense of self.
There is a long series of instances in which public health agencies have responded to disease outbreaks with dangerous Pollyannaism, seemingly violating their core mission.
The successful marketing of the “new science of morality” suggests its considerable allure for the popular imagination.
Demands on our attention come from the informational environments and shared physical spaces we inhabit. At issue are ethical questions about the conduct of civic life.
Gustav Theodor Fechner’s soul neither defies naturalism nor depends on revelation.
Vampire and zombie stories are stories of a new mass folklore. But they have dreamt themselves into us for specific reasons.
We might do a better job of living together if we believed that we are meant to do so.
Statistics in the Progressive Era were more than mere signs of a managerial government’s early efforts to sort and categorize its citizens.
Metrics do not and, in fact, cannot measure any intelligible conception of excellence at all
Quantification is more than merely a means of communication and persuasion in a fragmented culture.
Nowhere has the power of disembodied observation become more pervasive than in the workplace.
We have automated the society of clues to act on its own divinations, with consequences far beyond the individual.
The ideal mother, as countless novelists have known, is a dead one.
How are we ethically to evaluate the practice of getting stoned?
Democracy and science can be mutually reinforcing only if there is a recognition of the limited authority of each.
We might be murderers, and we might not, but isn’t it safer to assume we are and be proven wrong? Maybe not.
Because so many of our material and technological advances have been inherited, we take them for granted and demand more.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the health of the community is essential to the health of the individual.
Every critique of self-care is true. Unfortunately, you still have to take care of yourself.
Viewing the Anthropocene as “a measure of human impact on the planet” allows us to tell only one story.
More disorder, more screening, more care: the familiar talking points, all dutifully repeated.
There is the looming sense that critical theory is somehow near the center of the crisis of our time.
COVID made visible the usually subterranean core of the liberal project, which is not merely political but anthropological.
For many tech billionaires, citizenship is just one more consumer option in a competitive global marketplace.
The ultimate semantic receivers, selectors, and transmitters are still us.
The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.
The growing damage to truthfulness reflects something more—not just a personal discrepancy but a deep social discrepancy as well.
Calling the idea of wilderness into question makes as much sense as asking whether the United States is a democracy.
To say that writing novels trained a mind for eternity was a bold professional claim.
Considering how relationships of cooperation and perhaps even solidarity might be forged between human beings and animals.
The actual exchange between Oppenheimer and Einstein was far less cordial than the film’s version.
When we communicate using little data, we’re speaking the language of robots.
We would do well to challenge the headlong adoption of predictive medicine.
The regrettable but all-too-common phenomenon of medical personnel “turning a blind eye” to unethical and injurious practices.
Our inability to switch off our commonsense intuitions will lead us to adopt some odd, half-formed ideologies.
Racing to catch hold of the boons of progress, we trust in our power to secure our lives, singly and together, through “smart” decisions.
As Winter Storm Pax pushes across the eastern United States this week, I find myself pondering the power of names.
Is the science in social science worth defending? The short answer is yes, and the long answer is that it depends on how you define science.
As the power of science grows, its dominion extends even into areas of our culture where its proclaimed authority is questionable.
Everyone contributes to the pandemic, so all bear responsibility.
Models are only valuable in the long run if we are free to take them apart.
Even defenders of the idea today such as Bruno Latour admit that Gaia in the original Greek context is “a figure of violence."
Throughout the book, Sherrell eschews the phrase “climate crisis,” substituting a much more nebulous term: “the Problem.”
In the output of the AI generated image, the technique is there but the techne is not.
John von Neumann’s life ended the way many of those of his intellectual caliber end: in madness.
The strength of ideologies and fads in the US helps to explain why physician involvement in public life has declined.
We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.
Claude’s confession did not convince me that it was conscious.