Welcome to Issue #84 of Rebel Intellects
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👤 Rebel of the Week
Soren Kierkegaard: How not to be a phony
According to Soren Kierkegaard, we are each pulled in two directions: toward the "finite" or the "infinite." When we lean too far in either direction, we risk living stagnant and inauthentic lives.
📚 Light Reading
Are you the same person you used to be?
People have strong, divergent opinions about the continuity of their own selves. Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set in childhood, but what you’re like isn’t who you are.
How to get your mojo back
Do you feel blah? Not exactly suffering, but lacking interest and excitement? Do your days feel monotonous—same routines, same tiny annoyances? If this describes your experience, then you may be going through a period of languishing.
Why the world's most confident people create alter egos
It might seem odd to talk about yourself in the third person, but athletes, politicians, and business figures do it all the time. Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of “self-distancing,” a psychological tool that helps people reason more objectively and see the situation from a slight distance.
🔎 Study of the Week
How personality and intelligence intertwine
A comprehensive new study provides evidence that various personality traits and cognitive abilities are connected. This means that if someone is good at a certain cognitive task, it can give hints about their personality traits, and vice versa.
📺 Video of the Week
What is philosophy? The great Will Durant gives a wonderfully deadpan (and educational) lecture to a glib TV reporter. (4 mins)
🎙 Podcast Episode
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the power packs within cells in all complex life on Earth.
Mitochondria are essential for complex life, but as the components that run our metabolisms, they can also be responsible for a range of diseases, and they probably play a role in how we age.
🗣 In Quotes
“School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.”
— H. L. Mencken
👀 Perception Watch
There's nothing wrong with this little girl's legs!
😲 WTF
The "katzenklavier" ("cat organ") was a peculiar musical creation attributed to 17th-century German scholar Athanasius Kircher. It featured a line of confined cats, each with a distinct vocal pitch, played by a keyboardist who tapped nails into their tails.
😁 In the Memetime
📖 Book Club
In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom spins fact and fiction into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical drama.
Seamlessly alternating between Golden Age Amsterdam and Nazi Germany, Yalom investigates the inner lives of the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Spinoza and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg in a tale of influence and anxiety, the origins of good and evil, the philosophy of freedom, and the tyranny of terror.
🤔 Contemplation Corner
🎧 The Song of the Week
Jimmy Bo Horne — Dance Across The Floor
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🧠 Become a Rebel
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👍 Thanks for Reading
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Live well, and I’ll see you next week.
John