Joseph

Entropic Apex

For us a "long time" can be almost anything- ten or twenty years, two or three months, a few weeks, or even a couple of days. The South Asian, however, feels that it is perfectly realistic to th ink of a "long time" in terms of th ousands of years or even an endless period. A colleague once described their conceptualization of time as follows:... See more

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

You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.

But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely... I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the... See more

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

It’s going to be an expert through the proving of data — an expert through action, rather than an expert through appointment.

Economic miracles stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed.