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Public speech is easily reduced to an exercise in caricature, confected and boring, with the volume set too high. Amid this vast ado about nothing, it is little wonder that a decline in the standard of rhetoric is declared. But it is an illusion, and if public speech is boring the proper response is to be thankful.
When They Go Low, We Go High
Philip Collins
“Rewilding”.
The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual *forest,* overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.
Rewilding Your Attention
Clive Thompson
No voter can master every issue, and few voters try. Any democratic system must cope with that. Referendums, instead, invite us to ignore the question, give the snake-oil peddlers an edge, concentrate our ignorance into a tightly focused beam, and hold nobody accountable for results. They magnify the vulnerabilities of our democracies and diminish their defences.
How Referendums Break Democracies
Fran Monks
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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