Despite what my conservative friends say, I actually cleave to few radical notions, but one idea that they and their moderate brethren would consider pretty offensive follows. If we are to survive as a nation, as an economy, as a civilization, perhaps even as a species, we need to have an almost complete reversal in [...]
In his book God’s Universe, the astrophysicist Owen Gingerich takes the biologist E.O. Wilson to task for placing humankind within natural processes and not as their end. If it’s a leap for Wilson to say that man is not nature’s purpose, then it’s as much of a leap–or more–for Gingerich to make the connection between [...]
I’ve been thinking a whole lot lately about the old adage “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” The historian of religion Karen Armstrong would say that this saying is an indication of the tension between mythos and logos—the eternal ideal vs. the practical real.
And while I’m sure that’s [...]Virginia Woolf’s notion of a “room of one’s own” in which women could be freed from the responsibilities of domestic life had a good deal of resonance when she postulated it in the first half of the 20th Century. It could easily be argued that women, who still perform the bulk of housework, still need [...]
Despite Plato’s admonitions, we’re not a people keen on self-examination. We’re much more interested in the self-as-commodity: selling our high-concept idealizations of who we think we are to others and becoming frustrated when those we deal with don’t live up to the high-concept idealizations of who they think they are we’ve bought. So we should [...]
The usher said, “Your music fell down, so you might want to check your place.”
My music fell down. My Napster fell down. My iTunes, my collection of old and musty vinyl. What of those songs taken to heart, symphonies poked over in digital bitstream mapping, re-productions of the rhythms of those loved pop songs infused [...]
We want to be influenced by tradition, but not bound by it.
Digital watches, such as they are, really are a pretty neat idea. As we progress toward cloning and hydro-electric interactive bullriding, we have to consider the relevancy of an analog watch. As every PDA clipped to the waist of every rayon-shirted tech-head will attest, [...]