“We mustn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where’s the joy in these […]
“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn––and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: […]
“Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around, suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them […]
We live in a world shaped by scientific principles, but our understanding of those principles is always less than perfect. As technology and scientific inquiry become ever more embedded in our social and professional lives, it’s important not only to ensure exposure to reliable information, but also to ask how this trend affects the quality […]
“I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.” ––We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, pg. 298 “Will machines supplant human workers or augment them? On one level, they will do both. But once again, […]
David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is not a breezy book. From the first page, it plunged me into a fervid mode of double-layered analysis in which my struggle to comprehend the text was mirrored by efforts to track my personal reactions to whatever content I was able to wrest from it. Early on, […]
“Was my father kind to animals? I thought so as a child, but I knew less about the lives of lab rats then. Let’s just say that my father was kind to animals unless it was in the interest of science to be otherwise. He would never have run over a cat if there was […]
“The idea that we would spend the holiday talking about anything as potentially explosive as my arrest was a fiction, and we all knew this even as I was being made to promise to do so. My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family […]
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to shake my head when asked by another scifi enthusiast if I’ve ever read Dune. To be unfamiliar with Frank Herbert’s classic is to leave a giant of the genre unexplored––to dismiss a leap forward in our thinking about technology and futurism. Now that I’ve […]
“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what […]