Rowena Lei

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the... See more

Between 1909 and his death in 1963, the man made a truly impressive number of artworks: thousands of line drawings and sketches, hundreds of ceramics, more than 40 literary works, costumes and sets for at least a dozen major theater productions and ballets, and several murals and decorative commissions. He wrote poetry and plays, published six art... See more

“The story tells of a Count Axel and his wife, the Countess, in their utopia of leisure, art, and beauty; they live in a villa with a terrace that overlooks a garden of crystalline flowers with translucent leaves, gleaming glass-like stems, and crystals at the heart of every bloom. Though, as in all of Ballard’s work (‘Ballardian,’ per contemporary

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