Flight, Feathers, and Freedom
We love birds for their beauty, their feathers, and their flesh, but what do we really know about these light creatures that seemingly float so effortlessly above us?
We love birds for their beauty, their feathers, and their flesh, but what do we really know about these light creatures that seemingly float so effortlessly above us?
“Disenchantment” peaked in the early 1970s (Watergate, Vietnam), and now the word pops up everywhere you look.
We still speed. The most frequently broken law in the United States is the numeric speed limit. But now we speed because we are late or angry; there is seldom any joy in it. Nor is it safe: the roads are too crowded to allow safe reaction time and maneuvering.
Companies saw our foreshortened attention spans and went casino on us. Simple transactions now tease and puzzle and lure us, and bells ring and lights flash if we walk far enough or slide enough merch into our cart.
Often, the traumas we fear will scar us do not. Severe pain, major surgery, getting fired or broken up with, wrecking the car, losing one’s faith, embarrassing oneself…the angst fades, and while we can recount the details and even laugh about some of them, the sting…
Here is the story of how the development of nuclear power that had peacetime possibilities and Hyman Rickover’s personality merged at an essential moment to create a reactor that worked by 1953. Someone else could have developed the nuclear sub, but no one could have done it as quickly and as well as Rickover did.
Lauren Groff was nervous about writing a novel set two thousand and ten years ago. This, I get. Even the prospect of writing a book set before smartphones feels daunting: so many details to reconstruct, an entire lifeworld that functioned in a radically different way. Lovely…
Humans are analog, Hassan suggests. We were formed by the technology we created, the tools we drew from nature in order to extend our bodies and our brains. For millennia, we have connected to, and found meaning in, a material world.
I take no joy in the fact that I sweat like a racehorse who just came in second. The analogy is yet another measure of my neurosis, because I can still hear my grandmother murmuring, “Horses sweat, dear. Men perspire, and ladies glow.” I could light up the Dark Ages.
The attack on Dave Chappelle demonstrates that taboo-slaying is a bit more complicated process in this country than some might think, and who is on whose side might be murkier than some had hoped.