Mental Mix

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” — Albert Einstein

Monday Morning Mental Mix March 11, 2024

The Parents in My Classroom– Recently, one of my ninth grade English students told me her parents rewarded her for making the honor roll by allowing her to text them during class. “They like to know what I’m doing in the classroom as it’s happening live,” she said. “We have a cellphone policy,” I reminded her. slate.com He died in a Jewish ghetto. How did his...

Monday Morning Mental Mix February 26, 2024

Alabama Ruled Frozen Embryos Are Children — Now What?–Frozen embryos are children under Alabama law, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Friday in a decision that could have a huge impact on fertility treatments in the state. Burdick-Aysenne v. Center for Reproductive Medicine is a pair of consolidated wrongful-death cases brought by three couples whose frozen...

Monday Morning Mental Mix January 17, 2022

How the Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe–Much of the world’s recent growth in cooling capability has been an adaptive response to global warming. The problem is self-perpetuating, because the electricity that refrigerators and air-conditioners run on is mostly generated by burning fossil fuels. There are other climate impacts...

Monday Morning Mental Mix January 3, 2022

Hog farming has a massive poop problem–North Carolina is not the only place where the lagoon and sprayfield system exists. A lot of large-scale pig farms in the US store and dispose of waste in this way. However, in states like Iowa that experience more frequent freezing temperatures, farms store the waste in deep pits under the hog buildings. Other states...

Monday Morning Mental Mix for December 13, 2021

Can Britain Turn Bosnia Away from Secessionism?–Instead of first dealing with those who are the source of the crisis, and then looking for sustainable long-term Constitutional reform solutions, the currently proposed changes would permanently cement the ethnonational principle of ethnic clans, and would de facto legitimize apartheid. They are also in conflict...

Monday Morning Mental Mix March 2, 2020

Rats Are Us–That discovery was just the tip of the iceberg. We now know that rats don’t live merely in the present, but are capable of reliving memories of past experiences and mentally planning ahead the navigation route they will later follow. They reciprocally trade different kinds of goods with each other – and understand not only when they owe a favour to...

Monday Morning Mental Mix February 10, 2020

DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM: FINDING OUR WAY OUT OF THE DARKNESS–While democrats once believed that innovations in information and communications technology and data analysis would promote more open societies, the actual effects of these tools have been mixed. Authoritarians are using technology to deepen their grip internally, spread propaganda, undermine basic...

Monday Morning Mental Mix February 3, 2020

What Will the World Look Like in 2030?–When people imagine the future, they tend to assume that most things will stay the same, or that the trends of the recent past will continue in a linear fashion. But the world today looks very different than people expected it to look in 2010. And one thing that is virtually certain about this coming decade is that the...

Monday Morning Mental Mix January 27, 2020

Selective Hearing–Last August, one of the country’s most successful podcasts was accused of multiple incidents of plagiarism. Called Crime Junkie, the weekly show has used what seems to be an irresistible formula to rocket to number-one status in numerous rankings: In each episode, cohosts Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat give an intrigue-laced account of a...