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What art does is tell us that what we think we know, we don’t know at all.

At the 2013 School of Visual Arts commencement address, Rolling Stone cultural critic Greil Marcus adds to history’s finest definitions of art.

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Amy Webb, author of the fascinating Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, talks to Debbie Millman about how the very design of online dating profile questionnaires sabotages your odds of finding your soulmate.

Listen to the full interview here and subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more stimulating conversations with designers, artists, and writers.

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Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.

But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.

Here materialism bumps up against itself.

Andrew Ferguson considers the implications of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s provocative Mind and Cosmos.

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“The separation between science and human values is an illusion – and, actually, quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.”

Sam Harris, author of Lying, on how science can answer moral questions. Complement with Galileo’s letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany on the relationship between science and scripture.

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Truth from Goethe, from a 1931 educational catalog – a kind of vintage version of the Live Now spirit.

(Thanks, Eric.)

history and literature culture and society though and opinion Maria Bustillos books George Orwell Henry Miller John Waters

Here is a sad reflection for the ordinary reader, faced as he is with lifetimes upon lifetimes worth of books on entering even a small public library or a reasonably well-stocked bookshop. Since we can’t have very many, we must husband our time and attention carefully. But how to choose? The melancholy may lift a little when we realize that so many wise souls who have come before have been willing to serve as guides. And by guides, let’s be clear that I mean fellow-enthusiasts, not poseurs.

The New Yorker’s Maria Bustillos on what George Orwell, Henry Miller, and John Waters taught her about what to read next – complement with this meditation on the osmosis of reading and non-reading as intellectual choice.