Our Life is What We Pay Attention To

When our attention is lured, herded, and commandeered in such a way, our full human potential is profoundly subverted. “Our life experience,” William James once said, “will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.” We become what we attend to — nothing more, nothing less. A steady and exclusive stream of reality TV, entertainment gossip, social media chatter, and “breaking news” about the latest celebrity scandal or Trump’s most recent tweets — all...

 We value throwing a ball through a hoop more than science

That we have come so far in the enterprise of understanding nature, far enough to pry open the nucleus of the atom, to sail through interplanetary space, to lose ourselves in the Internet, and perform medical surgery with laser beams, all of this is cause for great celebration, not fear, and it's time we quit hiding all this under the covers and let these people come out of the shadows into the light of day and take accurate stock of their accomplishments and their failures and make an attemp...