Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Democracy’s survival depends on what happens inside our skulls, where anything is possible. The destruction of a shared reality does more damage than economic decline or impeachable acts.
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
From an interview between David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace in 1996.
DFW: Oh—the reason why I think you oughta do a book about TV, is this problem is not gonna go away. I don’t know about you, but in ten or fifteen years, we’re gonna have virtual reality pornography. Now, if I don’t develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure
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Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.
Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
In 1985, the great technology critic Neil Postman wrote, “to be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”
Ezra Klein • Abundance
Just a moment...
lareviewofbooks.org«THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER», DI JANET MALCOLM
Emmanuel Carrère • Propizio è avere ove recarsi (Opere di Emmanuel Carrère Vol. 7) (Italian Edition)
And while those furies sometimes ebb, they also sometimes flow. In a November 1963 lecture that formed the basis of a Harper’s cover story and of a book, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter defined what he called “the paranoid style in American politics,” a recurring popular tendency to adhere to extreme conspiratorial theories about threats
... See moreJon Meacham • The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
Large regions of the country have gone dark, enclosing citizens in private worlds of simplifications and lies.