Joseph

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.

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 r... See more

There’s a Russian saying about nostalgia: “The past is more unpredictable than the future.” It’s so common for people’s memories about a time to become disconnected from how they actually felt at the time.

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.

The past wasn’t as good as you remember. The present isn’t as bad as you think. The future will be better than you anticipate.

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: "Tim... See more

Entropic Apex

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous.