Category: culture

• Lewis Thomas on the awe-inspiring collective project of human language

  From The Lives of a Cell: There are lots of possibilities here, but if you think about the construction of the Hill by a colony of a million ants, each one working ceaselessly and compulsively to add perfection to his region of the structure without having the faintest notion of what is being constructed elsewhere,…

• Ursula K. Le Guin on the book as technology

  From Words Are My Matter: The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine;…

• Maria Popova on reality’s density of wonder

  The remarkable opening line of Maria Popova’s Figuring: All of it—the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had,…

• How Reading Books Instead Of News Made Me A Better Citizen

  In this new essay for Techdirt, I share an “attention experiment” I conducted during the 2016 election that was life-changing—and ultimately inspired the Analog Series. The lessons I learned from it feel uncomfortably relevant today. Here’s a taste: Reading was no longer an exercise in rubbernecking and literature armed me to face the challenges of…

• The best books I read in 2019

  Every month, I send a newsletter recommending three books that changed the way I see the world. Every year, I review each missive and curate my absolute favorites. I discovered so many gems in 2019 that choosing between them was excruciating, so I hope you enjoy this list of the twelve best books I read…

• In Praise of Sci-Fi Determinism

  Maize Magazine interviewed me for a feature on futurism and science fiction: Now that technology is changing our world at an unprecedented pace, science fiction is building a mythology of the 21st century—a mythology shaped by technology and climate change. Complement with imagining new institutions for the internet age, using science fiction to understand the…

• Government is a technology, so fix it like one

  The Roman Empire, the Iroquois Confederacy, and the United States of America are human inventions as surely as airplanes, computers, and contraception are. Technology is how we do things, and political institutions are how we collaborate at scale. Government is an immensely powerful innovation through which we take collective action. Just like any other technology,…

• Kevin Kelly on how technology creates opportunity

  “Long before Beethoven sat before a piano, someone with twice his musical talents was born into a world that lacked keyboards or orchestras. We’ll never hear his music because technology and knowledge had not yet uncovered those opportunities. Centuries later the fulfilled opportunity of musical technology gave Beethoven the opportunity to be great. How fortunate…

• Annalee Newitz on who owns the future

  Ownership often feels like a natural law. We all know what’s ours, and sometimes covet what isn’t. Hedge fund managers trade against each other in an endless cycle of one-upmanship. Kindergarteners refuse to share. Some master bathrooms have jealously guarded twin sinks. The pursuit of rational self-interest is what fuels the economy, right? Where would…

• Omar El Akkad on how to avoid American ruin

  It feels like America is tearing itself apart. The federal government is alternatively self-destructive or deadlocked. Filter bubbles enclose us in their comfortable but toxic embrace. Most Americans struggle to eke out a living even as corporate profits surge. Propagandists reverse engineer algorithms to deliver automated misinformation at scale. Outrage is the new normal. The…