“After 1908, and especially after 1945, capitalist greed was somewhat reined in, not least due to the fear of Communism. Yet inequities are still rampant. The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and Indonesian labourers return home after a […]
“At the dawn of the third millennium, the future of evolutionary humanism is unclear. For sixty years after the end of the war against Hitler it was taboo to link humanism with evolution and to advocate using biological methods to ‘upgrade’ Homo sapiens. But today such projects are back in vogue. No one speaks about […]
“The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. […]
“Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. The sculptor from the Stadel Cave may sincerely have believed in the existence of the lion-man guardian spirit. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the […]
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a stirring, nearly-flawless novel that breathes new life into the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction. When a hyper-aggressive strain of the flu kills more than 99 percent of the world’s population, Earth’s few survivors must decide how to live in a crumbling world. It’s a typical setup for this […]
Thoreau’s Walden is a masterpiece of transcendentalist philosophy that has inspired many generations of Americans. It’s also a text ripe for revival. My generation is trying to balance our dependence on modern technology with our love of the quickly-vanishing natural world. Too often it feels like we are caught in a zero-sum game pitting modernity […]
“We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all […]
John Markoff’s Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots is another addition to the growing stack of books designed to help us think about the relationship between humanity and emerging technologies. Markoff offers a detailed history of artificial intelligence and robotics, and attempts to show how past trends are […]
“There’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never.” ––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. […]
“What do these onlookers see as they bend over my broken body? I do not know. But inside me, the sun.” ––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. 320 “In an augmented reality world, the ‘Web’ will become the space that surrounds you. Cameras embedded in the glasses will recognize the objects […]