Commentary

We assume the quiet person in the room is shy and harmless. Sometimes they are bored, sometimes they are thinking, and sometimes they are a ninja.

David Foster Wallace went to a lobster festival for a food magazine and came back with questions about pain and mass tourism. Both still apply.

We have engineered boredom out of childhood, one screen at a time. Researchers suggest that may be a loss, because boredom is often where imagination starts.

Turn-by-turn navigation gets us there. Researchers have found it may also make us worse at knowing where “there” is.

About three-quarters of humanity is now online, and the Internet Archive has saved more than a trillion web pages. More information is not the same as more knowledge.

Hockey has more fights and baseball has bigger brawls. Basketball fights still dominate the coverage, and the reason is about ten feet from the court.