But this isn’t about phone numbers or navigation. It’s about how technology clearly changes our minds. And there is a risk that today’s siphoning of young brains into phones and laptops isn’t just happening with maps and digits, but with critical thinking and complex language.
In some ways, book reviewers, critics, book club hosts, readers, and even the writers themselves, are engaged in a long war against the idea of fiction itself, involving the reverse-engineering and geolocation of various hurts and harms in the psychology of the writer. We are, at least in America, a nation trained in the arts of literary analysis,... See more
A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes, anything-goes chatter, and large-scale coordinated pranks (several hoax bomb threats organised by the site have led to arrests and mass evacuations). Users operate under total anonymity and are subject to bare-bones moderation. Most of the... See more
One of the reasons we haven’t heard much about Pejačević until recently is because of her untimely death at the age of thirty-eight, just a month after giving birth to her only child. Given medical provision in the 1920s, it was always a risk for a woman to be pregnant in her late thirties. Perhaps with this in mind, Pejačević wrote a poignant... See more
In a stunning rebuke of traditional GOP deregulatory instincts, the Senate voted 99–1 to kill the measure. For the first time in decades, conservative priorities placed local cultural guardianship over the absolute freedom to innovate. That vote showed just how unsteady the old coalitions have become, and how powerful the populist realignment... See more
“As humans we are involved in a dance with things that cannot be stopped, since we are only human through things,” says Hodder. We will continue to perform lifestyles made possible by the Internet whether individual social media platforms survive or not, and even, especially, if we log off for good. Social media altered the world in the same way... See more