Friday morning articles
Why You Hate Your Job: A theory on the function of bullshit jobs: to maintain the illusion of meritocracy and to provide status and prestige for elites. (Current Affairs)
You weren’t supposed to see that. I’m going to tell you a quick story in the order in which it happened. You were there. You will be familiar with the sequence of these events. But you may not have reached the shocking conclusion that I have. At least not yet. Wait for it… (Reformed Broker)
Why does time go forwards, not backwards? The arrow of time began its journey at the Big Bang, and when the Universe eventually dies there will be no more future and no past. In the meantime, what is it that drives time ever onward? (BBC)
This miracle plant was eaten into extinction 2,000 years ago—or was it? Silphion cured diseases and made food tasty, but Emperor Nero allegedly consumed the last stalk. Now, a Turkish researcher thinks he’s found a botanical survivor. (National Geographic)
Where Is All the Book Data? I went looking for book sales data, only to find that most of it is proprietary and purposefully locked away. What I learned was that the single most influential data in the publishing industry—which, every day, determines book contracts and authors’ lives—is basically inaccessible to anyone beyond the industry. And I learned that this is a big problem. Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products. It’s time to use their data to study them. (Public Books)
This astronaut trains by flying fighter jets. We went along for the ride: Jared Isaacman, who commissioned a private astronaut flight to orbit last year, has purchased three more space trips from Elon Musk’s SpaceX (Washington Post)
What Einstein and Bohr’s debate over quantum entanglement taught us about reality: The microscopic world behaves very unlike the world we see around us. The idea of quantum entanglement came at a time when the world’s greatest minds debated if the world’s tiniest particles are governed by chance. The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was just awarded for the experimental test of Bell’s Inequality, showing that there is an uncertainty built into the Universe. (Big Think)
Laughter is vital For philosopher Henri Bergson, laughter solves a serious human conundrum: how to keep our minds and social lives elastic. (Aeon)
This Is What Life After the N.B.A. Looks Like: Life is good for some N.B.A. retirees who use millions in earnings to do whatever they want. But others say they have struggled to find a new identity without basketball. (New York Times)