Time was, you listened to jazz or rock, read mysteries or romances, majored in English lit. or anthropology, craved Chinese or Italian. You stuffed your likes into compartments. Then came cross-fertilization, influences, blends, hybrids, boundary-breaking ecommerce. Now you can listen to Japanese jazz or Afro-Celtic rock, read a literary mystery that is […]
Say a universal income was instituted, or you won the lottery, or were lucky enough to find a job that paid you to do what you enjoyed. What would you do if all your basic financial needs were met? My mom used to say, “If I had all the money in the world….” […]
The moon, I hear, is rusting. This seems entirely wrong. Nature is meant to be pristine; wet oxygen should gnaw on shipwrecked hulls, carburetors, iron gates, cartwheels. The machines in the garden, the futile artifacts that tried and failed to be powerful. Never the moon. The Moon stays with us, loyal as a […]
The body changes over time, grows creakier, squeakier, crinklier, wheezier. Once those you love hit a certain age, the changes are seldom hopeful. And if you try to get a prognosis from a medical professional, you get as many answers as a Catholic who goes priest shopping. The problem is the same in […]
A new report from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs warns of dangers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) unlike those from androids in dystopian science-fiction movies. This AI, the report’s author, Bruce Schneier, explains, is disembodied, specific to certain tasks, unpredictable, and probably already with us. Bruce Schneier has published 14 books, […]
Nothing sounds sweeter than the name of someone you have fallen in love with; nothing intrigues you more than your own name, overheard. “Pronounce people’s names,” my mother urged her shy daughter. “People love to hear their names spoken.” Refusing to speak someone’s name either acknowledges their power or cancels it. Some traditions […]
When Ulysses S. Grant arrived in St. Louis in September 1843, he was twenty-one years old, weighed 117 pounds, and had a bad cough. Back home in Bethel, Ohio, a barefoot stableman had dressed up like Grant and paraded down the street, apparently drunk, to mock his new second lieutenant’s uniform. On the […]
A giant balloon, released in the Arctic, spewing chalk dust to dim the sun. It sounds the stuff of a late-night horror flick, but the project had the imprimatur of Bill Gates and researchers at Harvard University—not to mention $30 million in private funding. The ultimate tinkering, it sounds like something a kid […]
When was it decided that every cover letter had to include the phrase “I have a passion for”? How did we decide our private pastimes would fascinate? Maybe it begin with all that pressure to rack up extracurricular activities. Or with Gen X cynicism, the almost narcoleptic refusal to show enthusiasm about anything. […]
So much hate fills the air, a thick and sometimes bloody miasma. We talk with alarm about hate crimes, hate groups, hate speech. But what is hate? David Hume pronounced it “altogether impossible to define.” I think of it as a dark, pulsing, amorphous monster I know to flee. But in Hatred: Understanding […]
