David Pennington

The “Silurian Hypothesis” is a fun thought experiment.

It posits Earth may have had advanced civilizations in the deep past that we are, today, unaware of. Why wouldn’t we know about them? Because if they existed millions of years ago and died out, their architecture would be long gone. “No ruins of ancient football stadiums, highways or housing... See more

Carl Benedikt Frey: “There is no iron law that postulates that technology must benefit the many at the expense of the few.”

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans... See more

In the 1960s, psychologist Jerome Singer, the grandfather of daydreaming studies, identified three kinds of mind-­wandering: the productive, creative “positive constructive daydreaming,” obsessive “guilty–­dysphoric daydreaming,” and “poor attentional control.” Singer believed daydreaming was a positive adaptive behavior—­a bold departure from the... See more

Q: In Wayne Ewing ‘s documentary, Breakfast with Hunter , you stated that, in your opinion, readers of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas believed the artist and author to be one and the same. You also stated that without your drawings nobody would have noticed the story. Do you believe this or were you just trying to get a rise out of Hunter?

A: I... See more

“Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession,” wrote Frederick Buechner. ”It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps.”

This is the bottom line : if we don’t make room for deliberate play, we’ll burn out under the weight of seriousness we’ve forced upon our own shoulders.

My psychological tabs are maxed out, and there’s no alert to clear storage or update my internal OS.

I can’t tell it’s happening, but it creeps in and settles into a quiet, directionless overwhelm, a kind of existential buffering I’ve started to call “multiverse fatigue”.

No tab to close. No log-out option. Too many realities to keep up with.