Technology
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For all of human history, memory was the treasure and forgetting was the thief. Every technology of civilization, the alphabet, the library, the printing press, the photograph, the cloud, was a weapon aimed at the thief. Knowledge kept escaping through the holes in our heads, and we spent five thousand years plugging them. We won.…
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There is a clinical trial running right now in which GLP-1 drugs, the same molecules behind Ozempic and Wegovy, are being tested for their effect on emotional blunting. Separately, consumer neurostimulation headsets are being marketed to flatten anxiety on demand. A startup in San Francisco is offering a subscription that adjusts your baseline mood the…
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We inherit a great deal from the people who came before us. Their land, their debts, their noses, their predispositions to certain diseases. What we do not inherit, frustratingly, is the one thing that might actually be useful: what they knew. Every generation arrives at the same problems with the same blank slate, rediscovering grief…