“For Pham Nuwen, there was no pain. The last minutes of his life were beyond any description that might be rendered in the Slowness or even in the Beyond. So try metaphor and simile: It was like…it was like…Pham stood with Old One on a vast and empty beach. Ravna and the Tines were tiny […]
“It’s always amusing to see people who think themselves the center of the universe. Take the recent spread of the Blight [references follow for readers not on those threads and newsgroups]. The Blight is an unprecedented change in a limited portion of the Top of the Beyond––far away from most of my readers. I’m sure […]
Since I began listening to NPR’s Planet Money and the Slate Money podcast, I’ve hatched a significant desire to correct my deficiency in economic and financial knowledge. When I heard John Lanchester plugging his new book on the “Read These Books Edition” of Slate Money, I thought How to Speak Money would be a good starting […]
Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s The Transhumanist Reader is probably the single best source for readers interested in a crash course in transhumanist philosophy. It presents more than forty essays addressing myriad aspects of transhumanist theory, with a good mixture of classic (i.e. pre-21st-century) papers and contemporary ones. It is a dense text containing a […]
“‘Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. ‘And that is the one practical difference.’ ‘He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better […]
“What could Marilyn Monroe’s death ever have to do with me? ‘IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US,’ said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. ‘SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY––NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER […]
As an amateur neuroscience enthusiast, I’m obligated not only to seek out the best and most recent neuroscientific findings, but also to be wary of how these findings might be abused. Any scientific discipline that can be easily monetized and/or misinterpreted by the popular media will spawn its share of hacks, prophets, and snake oil […]
“Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news––the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, […]
After a disappointing standoff with The Gunslinger, two of my closest friends encouraged me to give Stephen King another shot before writing him off entirely. One of them, a longtime fan, suggested that On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft would be a better fit for me. She was right. On Writing is a quick, […]
Every human struggle needs an image of a better future for supporters to rally around, but it’s never enough to simply know where we want to end up. The accomplishment of profound societal change, if sought peacefully, also demands a set of linguistic and psychological frames revolutionaries can use to inform, impassion, and ultimately persuade […]