Join 📚 Alexander's Highlights
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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
[Studies have shown](http://www.pnas.org/content/106/14/6008.full) auditory memory is typically inferior to visual memory, and while most of us can read for hours, our ability to focus on a speech is more constrained.
A Speech Is Not an Essay
John Coleman
“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
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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