“Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only […]
“Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and […]
“Both the Code of Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence claim to outline universal and eternal principles of justice, but according to the Americans all people are equal, whereas according to the Babylonians people are decidedly unequal. The Americans would, of course, say that they are right, and that Hammurabi is wrong. Hammurabi, naturally, […]
Modern America faces a labor crisis that is both practical and existential. Even as new kinds of work are rapidly being created, we can’t adequately educate and fully employ the workforce we already have. Worse, we’ve created a system where elites have almost exclusive access to intellectually challenging and meaningful work opportunities, with everyone else […]
“We know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though […]
“Yes, there is death in this business of whaling––a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are […]
“The idea that we would spend the holiday talking about anything as potentially explosive as my arrest was a fiction, and we all knew this even as I was being made to promise to do so. My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family […]
“Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it. I have seen a friend become a worshiper, he thought. In a rush of […]
“I think the future of something we may no longer call feminism must include a deeper inquiry into men,” writes Rebecca Solnit in the closing pages of Men Explain Things to Me. “Feminism sought and seeks to change the whole human world; many men are on board with the project, but how it benefits men, […]
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 […]