“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 […]
“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, […]
“What’s with all the sentimentality about nature anyway, and the kowtowing to it, as though adhering to the ‘natural’ had some sort of ethical force? It’s not like nature is such a friend to womankind, not like nature doesn’t just blithely kill women off on a random basis during childbirth or anything. No one who faces […]
Three years ago, my father pointed me toward a frightfully thick book called Cryptonomicon that permanently rearranged my relationship with modern fiction. Since that first taste, Neal Stephenson has challenged me in every way an author can (including nearly boring me to death). Stephenson looms larger in my literary pantheon––and weighs more heavily on my […]
“‘We need brains, is the bottom line,’ Ivy said. ‘We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. […]
Ramex Naam’s Nexus Arc has become wildly popular since I read the first installment back in early 2013. I’ve enjoyed this series and would recommend it to pretty much anyone interested in near-future scifi, but I have to admit that Apex was a rather lukewarm finale. While Naam has created a vibrant speculative landscape full […]
Next month, Ma and I will be installing something we’ve wanted ever since I took the permaculture design course at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center: rainwater catchment. Ma’s been looking into it on and off for months, and we finally found a guy through a friend who pitched us a simple design for a […]
If you decide to read one piece of nonfiction this summer, let this be it. Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future is one of the most intelligent and important works of futurism to date. Although the book’s title might trigger images of popcorn and 3D glasses rather […]