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Category: word power

Word power: Jean M. Twenge on “iGen”

The twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

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Word power: a senior member of Australia’s current government speaks frankly

…and anonymously:

this person observed his vocation was becoming unsustainable for normal people. By normal people, he meant balanced people. If balanced people could no longer cop the life, the profession would shrink back to representation by a very narrow type of personality—people who live for the brawls and the knockouts, and can’t function without the constant affirmation of being a public figure. We would end up with representation by ideologues, adrenalin junkies and preening show ponies, posturing for a media chorus as unhinged as the political class.

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Word power: populism, “post-truth”, anger, Trump, Brexit, elites…

This post highlights three interesting essays on the above.

Only one author is primarily a journalist; the other two are, respectively, an English physicist/cosmologist and an Australian (of Greek ancestry) who is best known for his provocative literary fictions.

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Word power from Helen Garner/ Merry Christmas from Pelican Yoga

 

A Qualup Bell – simply being itself – is lovelier than any jingle bells, jiving. Religious leaders’ “seasonally appropriate” platitudes ring as hollow as electioneering politicians’ “motherhood statements”. But you are one click away from a beautifully poignant, perceptive perspective on motherhood…

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Word power: “Do elephants have souls?”

What elephants may be lacking most of all is not language but the Rosetta Stone to prove they have it and clue us in to what on God’s green earth they’re talking about all the time…. They have a vocal range of ten octaves (a piano has seven), and up to three-quarters of the sounds they produce are inaudible to human ears. 

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