I discovered Ada Palmer via a couple interviews on one of my favorite podcasts, Singularity.FM (Interview #1, Interview #2). Even if you have no interest in this series or science fiction in general, I highly recommend that you listen to these interviews. If you do, you’ll quickly find yourself enthralled by what is surely one […]
There can be no doubt that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels comprise one of the great literary masterpieces of the early 21st century. Even so, the end of this series left me numb, enervated to the point of apathy. It’s hard to tell if my reaction is the aberrant result of a desolate narrative’s collision with the very […]
I read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when I was a teenager, and it went completely over my head. I missed one of the key plot points and also failed to connect with the novel in a way that felt moving or meaningful. This time around, I think I understood enough to recognize the tremendously tragic […]
In a recent discussion, a friend of mine identified a conspicuous lacuna in our cultural conversations about the human mind and technology. This lacuna, he said, arose from a tendency to treat the brain as a discrete, self-contained information-processing and experience-producing system. When we do this, it becomes easier (albeit still daunting), to imagine successfully […]
If I could trade the fictional world of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women for the real one, I’d seriously consider it. This tale of familial bonding and kind neighborliness will warm even the coldest heart. Set in New England during and after the American Civil War, the novel charts the adolescence and early adulthood of the four March […]
Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future. On this gray May morning, I’m trying to articulate the best lesson I’ve learned from the pandemic thus far. There are so many things we are learning––as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations, as a species––that it’s impossible to huddle it all […]
Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future. I come to you this morning in a difficult mental state––one with which I’m not very familiar. Nothing particularly eventful has occurred since my last journal, and yet my perspective has shifted in a way that I’m struggling to understand. I am feeling […]
Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future. Since I know a few of my readers will be eager for news, I’ll start today with a quick update on Charlie’s situation. (For background, please see last week’s journal.) I’m pleased to report that Charlie and his partner arrived in Humboldt after […]
Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a good opportunity for humanity to collectively interrogate an idea that we probably ought to scrutinize more often. This is the concept of “normality”––the notion that there exists some stable state of affairs we can use as a […]
Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders is a fictionalized account of the 1665 plague outbreak in Eyam, England. Upon realizing its situation, this small but noble village decided to self-quarantine in an effort to stop the disease from spreading to other communities. With few verifiable details about exactly what occurred in the fourteen months the residents of Eyam […]