Since well before the 2008 financial crisis, the practice of economic austerity has beleaguered American and European politics. Praised by the right as a panacea of renewed financial responsibility, and decried by the left as a mechanism for dismantling the West’s already struggling middle classes, austerity signifies a critical juncture where battered economies face radically […]
“A book is different––it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, as the Master stated many times.” ––The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson, loc. 2709-16 “This view of the current crisis and its necessary remedy is […]
“We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. ‘Common as the air’ meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver glow in the moonlight, was […]
“Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some […]
I picked up Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep as part of my due diligence for understanding key moments in the history of science fiction. As the first writer to popularize the idea of a technological singularity in fiction as well as nonfiction, Vinge has proved himself one of scifi’s most intelligent and prescient […]
“For Pham Nuwen, there was no pain. The last minutes of his life were beyond any description that might be rendered in the Slowness or even in the Beyond. So try metaphor and simile: It was like…it was like…Pham stood with Old One on a vast and empty beach. Ravna and the Tines were tiny […]
“It’s always amusing to see people who think themselves the center of the universe. Take the recent spread of the Blight [references follow for readers not on those threads and newsgroups]. The Blight is an unprecedented change in a limited portion of the Top of the Beyond––far away from most of my readers. I’m sure […]
“Finally, a philosophical note. We of Zonographic Eidolon watch the zone boundary and the orbits of border stars. For the most part, the zone changes are very slow: 700 meters per second in the case of the long-term secular shrinkage. Yet these changes together with orbital motion affect billions of lives each year. Just as […]
“The ‘Blight,’ that was the other common name for the Perversion, and closer to Old One’s view. For all the Perversion’s transcendence, its life style was more similar to a disease than anything else. Maybe that had helped to fool Old One. But now Pham could see: the Blight lived in pieces, across extraordinary reaches […]
Since I began listening to NPR’s Planet Money and the Slate Money podcast, I’ve hatched a significant desire to correct my deficiency in economic and financial knowledge. When I heard John Lanchester plugging his new book on the “Read These Books Edition” of Slate Money, I thought How to Speak Money would be a good starting […]