“The moment you protect your family, your country, a bit of coloured rag called a flag, a belief, an idea, a dogma, the thing that you demand or that you hold, that very protection indicates anger. So can you look at anger without any explanation or justification, without saying, ‘I must protect my goods’, or […]
“‘The more we “communicate” the way we do, the more we create a hellish world,’ wrote Parisian philosopher––also a historian of cybernetics––Jean-Pierre Dupuy. I take ‘hell’ in its theological sense, i.e., a place which is void of grace––the undeserved, unnecessary, surprising, unforeseen. A paradox is at work here: ours is a world about which we […]
“A terabyte is how much data a typical analog television station broadcasts daily, and it was the size of the United States government’s database of patent and trademark records when it went online in 1998. By 2010, one could buy a terabyte disc drive for a hundred dollars and hold it in the palm of […]
“We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing The King in Yellow. Oh the sin of writing such words,––words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the […]
“In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages. The new, oblique, looping views of genes and memes have enriched us. They give us paradoxes to write on Möbius strips. ‘The human world is made of stories, not people,’ writes David Mitchell. ‘The people the stories […]
“He and Jones were now no more than four feet apart, separated only by the log wall of the cabin. Richard could squat there and wait and hope that Jones would move into just the right position so that Richard could fire through a gap between logs. Or he could go out the way he […]
“During the quarter of an hour that Sokolov spent fleeing from the jihadists and hiding in a cold and wet place beneath a fallen log, he thought about age. These ruminations were triggered by all that he had done in the last half hour or so. He had created an effigy, seen it shot to […]
They tell me spring doesn’t start “officially” until March 20th, but I think that most people feel spring more than they mark it off on the calendar. Between alternating heavy rain and lengthening sunny days, Humboldt is coming back to life with undeniable vigor. And while this place stays green pretty much year-round, there’s a […]
“By 1880, four years after Bell conveyed the words ‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,’ and three years after the first pair of telephones rented for twenty dollars, more than sixty thousand telephones were in use in the United States. The first customers bought pairs of telephones for communication point to point: […]
“Sokolov pulled the long gun case out of the backseat and laid it across his lap. He opened it up to reveal the weapon. By popping out two pins he was able to break it down into two pieces, neither of which was more than about a foot and a half long, and by collapsing […]