Brian Scott Gallagher is the Communications Director at Ethical Systems.
In the 1982 film Blade Runner, the bioengineered human Roy Batty confronts his maker, Eldron Tyrell, the head of Tyrell Corporation, a biorobotics company based in the bleak and decrepit city of Los Angeles. The corporation manufactures human “replicants” for slave labor in colonies across the solar system. Batty is one of the best of […]
In her new book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, Mónica Guzmán outlines a recipe for disarming and transcending political polarization. A journalist, Guzmán draws from her experience working in communications for a nonprofit depolarization group called Braver Angels. “The book’s greatest offering, I […]
Perhaps the signature trait of our species isn’t the smarts any one person might possess, but the knowledge we can collectively accumulate. The annoying or maddening thing, of course, is our tendency to forget. We can know great, useful things—like that on occasion rocks large and small, full of fabulous metals, can fall from the […]
In Star Wars Han tells Leia, after rescuing her from execution, “Look, I ain’t in this for your revolution and I’m not in it for you, princess. I expect to be well paid. I’m in it for the money.” Later, Luke tells him, as fighters are boarding their X-Wings to attack the Death Star, “You […]
The social psychologist Debra Mashek, a self-styled “collaboration maven,” eloquently distilled, on a recent episode of Breaking the Fever, what that much-used c-word truly means. Worthwhile to do, she said, because the term, as a label, often gets thrown around haphazardly, doesn’t it? People get together, having some vague ambition to work with one another […]
One of the riskiest decisions in my life, I still tend to think, was going to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. It wasn’t going to be cheap. I’d have to work off tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. And, with the journalism industry being what it was—business models for media outlets […]
A powerful idea, that of mimetic desire, seems to be getting out there, spreading like a compelling meme. Chloe Valdary, for example—the Black entrepreneur who was profiled this year in The Atlantic concerning her heterodox antiracism programs—said yesterday, on Twitter, that she recently learned about mimesis theory, and found it fascinating. “When liminality”—meaning a period […]
In 2018, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of Basecamp, published a book on workplace culture. On the cover, a big red X crosses out a list of ostensibly undesirable traits of job life, things like “80-hour work weeks,” “endless meetings,” “no time to think” and, lastly, “chat’s blowing up.” Scrawled underneath this […]
Jessica Kennedy gets frustrated when people—often academics—try to paint industry and finance as evil. Business rightfully attracts moral critique, of course, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t those in industry who are awake and alert to its ethical shortcomings. Kennedy points out that, while working in investment banking, she was as focused on ethics then […]
Three forces—the rise of affective polarization, the social fragmenting of an engagement-focused media ecosystem, and the growing importance of politics to the self—help to explain the recent assault on the United State Capitol. At least, that’s how Ethical Systems’ founding director, Jon Haidt, an expert in the political dimensions of social psychology, described the situation. […]
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