Like Mac Davis, I believe in music. When I listen to music, or at least certain kinds of music, I feel transported to another place, my mood is elevated, I feel a new sense of harmony, and I am able to focus more clearly on what seems to matter most. A physicist might come along and say that what I call music is merely the scraping of horse’s hairs across cat gut, a mechanical vibration in a particular frequency range. A neurologist might come along and explain that I am merely experiencing the transduction of kinetic energy into electrical energy as processed by neurons in the auditory and higher associative cortices of the brain. And yet, there is something about the music that is hard to reckon in such terms. It would be like saying that a passionate embrace is merely the pressing of flesh on flesh.

“Something always eludes the scientists, the poets, the stargazers, the biologists, the anthropologists,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary in 1942.

Now, in a meditation on the limits of neuroscience, Richard Gunderman considers what that “something” might be when it comes to the transcendence music makes us feel.

Complement with the science of how music enchants the brain.

(via explore-blog)

(via explore-blog)

Even if you argue that the country is obliged to take care of its aging seniors, the recipients of nearly $1.5 trillion in annual benefits through Social Security and Medicare (and by the way, I’m in that age group), it’s also important to ask why there isn’t more focus on America’s next generations. Either because of the government debt that continues to grow — and that will be the burden today’s young people have to address — or because of the fact that at least one in five children in the U.S. today live in poverty.
Judy Woodruff on the ‘Burden of a Generation’ (via newshour)

(via newshour)

Roxane Gay is Spelled With One "N": Feminism (Plural)

roxanegay:

Feminism is flawed. Feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. When feminism falls short of…

yes yes yes to all of this. I am a bad feminist as well, but I am most definitely a feminist.

P.S. if you aren’t already following Roxane, remedy that quick!

Roxane Gay is Spelled With One "N": You Can Stop Saying "I'm Not a Feminist But" Now.

roxanegay:

Today, I am done with women bending over backwards to disavow feminism. I’ve been done with this for a while but I am EXTRA done today.

I mean, ladies, do whatever you want and be whatever you want and be however you want and believe whatever you want but stop saying, “I’m not a feminist,…

THIS, forever and ever amen.

At what point, precisely, does adulthood begin its irreversible forward march? When you’re born? When you lose your virginity? When the government deems you mature enough to drive, drink, vote, smoke, or go off to war? At midnight on your 30th birthday? According to Greta Gerwig, childhood ends the moment you go from constantly wanting to be a grown-up to being horrified that you can’t stop it from happening. “I think the moment you become an adult is when you watch the Olympics and realize that you’ll never be on the gymnastics team,” says the 28-year-old actor from her perch atop a windowsill radiator at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in Soho. “I’ve talked to a lot of girls who’ve had that moment, like, I’m 12 and those girls are 15, and I can’t possibly learn to do that in three years. It’s the awareness that there are things that you won’t achieve based on your age. I think it started for me when I watched Searching for Bobby Fischer, and I was like, I’m never going to be a child chess champion.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Greta Gerwig (But Were Afraid to Ask), BulletMedia.com, March 12th, 2012 (via xx-rapunzel-xx)

(via nellienellie)

Source: xx-rapunzel-xx