Word: ideas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Gordon Gekko got it wrong. In his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, primatologist Frans de Waal uses a variety of studies on empathy in animals to debunk the idea that humans are competitive to the core. He talked to TIME about contagious yawning, why we share and Bernie Madoff. (See photos of Madoff's downfall...
Given all the science that tells us about empathy in animals and in ourselves, why do you think the idea persists that at bottom we're competitive backstabbers? It was established at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when probably it was useful to have a picture of humans as competitive and to base the capitalist system on that image. And in doing so, a lot of political ideologues and economists started to forget that we are also a highly social species. The founder of economics, Adam Smith - to his credit - did realize that if you build a system completely...
...distance from—the science that allows Powers to arrive at the book’s core issue: Genetic engineering, for all the moral qualms that arise from it, gives humanity a chance to rewrite, to edit, to choose its own genetic story.This is the central idea behind the novel, and “Generosity” explores it in endless, and often brilliant, variations. Russell’s subject—creative nonfiction—is exactly what genetic enhancement is: reality, just with some creativity, to make it something you want to read about. The book...
...produce a documentary for the BBC and to gather material for poems based on conversations with British troops. Armitage says he is aware that such a project would be fraught with ethical and logistical difficulties. “I certainly wouldn’t go there with the idea of becoming a spokesperson for the army or an apologist for the war,” he says. “I’m interested in human stories, in what it takes for a young man or a young woman to leave home at 18 years old and suddenly find...
...article by a market analyst that partially attributed the success of Coca-Cola to the way its original glass bottles mimicked the shape of a woman’s body, Ortega set out to explore the various forms a uniform glass bottle can take. Working from the initial idea of the bottle representing sexuality, Ortega plays with variations of embracing bottles, personifying the objects in the act of lovemaking. He branches out in his experimentation of form to create an array of bottles that have embellishments, multiple colors, modified shapes, or all three. Each bottle is striking...