Joseph

I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and per-spective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of infor-mation and context that is by definition part of 2007’s overall... See more

Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary rendi-tions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the 6

Marshall McLuhan was spot on here -"people prefer bad news to good news, because bad news provides them with a "survival emotion" while good news threatens them with change

There are those, of a psychological bent, who would sa y t hat we are obsessed with time . They can point to individuals in American culture who are li terally time-ridden. And even the rest of us feel very strongly about time because we have been taught to take it so seriously. We have stressed this aspect of cu lt ure and developed it to a point... See more

Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the pre-Internet world can be understood in part as modulating the time domain.

It’s that great leadership is presence, not absence.

People of the Western world, particularly Americans, tend to think of time as something fixed in nature, something around us and from which we cannot escape; an ever-present part of the environment, just like the air we breathe. That it might be experienced in any other way seems unnatural and strange, a feeling which is rarely modified even when... See more

Complete attention,” Weil declared, “is like unconsciousness.” As such, it is a state that does not entail a particular action or stance, but instead suggests a form of reception, open and nonjudgmental, of the world.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.