A cosmology episode is a sudden loss of meaning, followed eventually by a transformative pivot, which creates the conditions for revised meaning.

The central claim of the Investment Theory is that since ordinary citizens cannot afford to acquire the information required to invest in political parties, the political system will be dominated by those who can.

To clarify: I’m not talking about the popular conception of the Turing test as something like the Voight-Kampff test, meant to catch rogue AIs—but Turing’s original test, meant for AI designers to evaluate their own machines. In particular, I’m assuming the designers know their machine well enough to distinguish between a true inability and a feigned one (or to construct the test in a way that motivates the machine to make a genuine attempt).

And examples of human inabilities might be learning a language that violates the patterns of natural human languages, or engaging in reflexive group behavior the way starlings or fish schools do.

Three centuries after Aristotle's Poetics, the meaning of mimesis as a literary method had shifted from "imitation of nature" to "imitation of other authors". For Dionysian imitatio, the object of imitation was not a single author but the qualities of many.

“There were several neighbors that came out, there were panic calls, and the ICE officers left,” she added, noting that the agents were masked and would not identify themselves. “They said, according to the neighbors, that there were too many white people around to detain this parent. Too many white people. So white people, thank you for being a part of this struggle.”

Three years after California launched a savings program to help children pay for college, most families still haven’t claimed the money — and many don’t even know it’s there.