Are there any fascinating subjects you've been especially interested in lately?

Astrology. No, not the shit you see in newspapers. I’m talking about the ancient version of astrology, the one that uses systematic calculation of planet position for its reading. According to it, he so-called “star signs” are just metaphors for certain characteristics of a person’s psychology, and a full personality requires many different planets and star signs. I can’t say I wholeheartedly believe in it, but knowing that there’s an entire school of thought behind astrology is an eye-opener.

And it sounds morbid, but I recently develop an interest in the psychology of suicide. Do people commit suicide simply out of misery? Why do artists and writers prone to committing suicide and even romanticize it? Why does human have the ability to take their own life at will? I’m in no way suicidal, but there is something in this dark topic that pitches my curiosity. Or maybe I just want to understand the mind of a suffering person and know a good way to assist them through life.

Machine learning. As a programmer, I would like to know, at least at a high level, how it works. I have very mixed feelings about it, because I fear what uses will be made of it.

Dark and fascinating subject, yes. The unbelievably fast decline of the state of American politics.

Your coworker sounds like a blithering idiot.

Every subject I study turns fascinating if I stick with it long enough. Maybe partly for that reason I’m avoiding rap and hip-hop out of principle, because “some of it isn’t complete dreck”, but most of it still seems to be.

Currently I’m reading books about
– thoughts on the idea and implications of infinity (Approaching Infinity, by Michael Huemer)
– the revolution in the Belgian Congo of 1959–60 (The Catastrophist, by Ronan Bennett)
– psychology (Scott Adams)
– futurism – not divination and prophecy, well, “not exactly”, but sensible prediction of likely outcomes of current technology and thinking (The Inevitable, whose author I’ve currently forgotten)
– concepts and novels of large scale armed warfare (Sun Tzu, Tom Kratman, Michael Williamson, John Ringo and others)
– Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn (just arrived yesterday, but it’s high on the list of “next to read”)
– the editing and criticism process for beginning writers, particularly in the arena of military and science fiction and politics (snippets on Facebook)

The ideas that can be arrived at from the synthesis of so many different topics are pretty awesome, too.

I’ve always been interested in endangered, unusual and rare wild life and have recently begun posting profiles of animals on another site. Every day is a new, unusual, or rare/endangered creature. Yesterday was the Cantons soft shelled turtle, a few days ago it was the Sao Tome Shrew. It’s a fun little thing I have been enjoying, researching and sharing. I think I need a pith helmet and a pair of binoculars to get in character with. haha

I am reading a very detailed history of the Stonewall Riots, and I’m fascinated by how little I really knew of LGBT life before the riots. I’ve just got to the very beginning of the riots. The police have conducted their raid, and the crowds have gathered. I can’t wait to get into the thick of the action. The writer has done a good job so far of setting the stage with the various individuals who were prominent in LGBT-rights movement before the riots. It will be interesting to see how things develop.

History, but not the regular kind. I’m interested in stuff like history of fashion, animation, arts, literature, stuff like that.
Recently I got a question about fashion in Serbia in 20s and I found an amazing work about it. I got even more interested in history of fashion then.
One or two days ago someone asked what were the earlest made animated films. I fell into a rabbit hole. Old cartoons are incredibly fascinating, I really enjoyed researching.
I’m mostly interested in things concerning humanities and culture.

There’s a good book called “This is Your Brain on Music”, about the psychology and neuroscience of musical preferences. It discusses in length about how people who listen to Hip Hop/Rap and Country music (to the exclusion of other genres) are demonstrably unintelligent.

To answer the question directly: I’m a bit of an autodidact. I’m always studying something. However, recent political events in my country have left me mentally exhausted, so my free time lately has been spent mostly playing video games and painting.

At face value, that study about country music and hip-hop sounds ridiculous – but I’ll have to look more into the study. I think the phrase “correlation doesn’t equal causation” might be applicable here.

It just seems weird to me that they would narrow down these two genres…why not rock or blues? Or smooth jazz?

The book discusses it – Dr. Levitin explains it has much to do with the simplistic nature of these types of music – with country, for instance: there’s the G, C, D chording, the formulaic nature of the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/chorus layout, the predictable, comfortable subject matter – my girl, my truck, my dog, huntin’, fishin’, America…

Don’t take my word for it. The book is worth a read. And this particular issue is just a small part of the book overall.

But that description only desbribes about 5 percent of country music. It appears that the author is making broad generalizions. Many country songs are poetic and sad. Maybe the author is mainly referring to modern country?

Maybe you could read the book instead of judging it based on a couple of sentences?