On the return of “history
I've being seeing the word "history" propping up frequently in the titles of articles. Those of "a certain age" will remember talk, a few decades ago, of the end of history. H…
Commentary
64 posts
A bunch of DFW stuff
* Selections from DFW's personal library * An unedited interview with David Foster Wallace * an older interview (1989 ?!) with DFW * another (less) old interview from 1998: * The most recent…
Orwell and Wells
Another long-form article that I found relevant to the current time; here's the full article, which was originally written in August 1941, or about eight decades ago. I present my selections here…
Random Note #6782036478
A perspective on waste and social media. From this article Waste books/Sudelbücher This sub-genre of notebooks comes out of the tradition of double-entry book keeping where accountants often kept a…
"On Cyberspace"
Warning: From 1995 (25 years ago!) Today the term "cyberspace" sounds silly (perhaps "internet culture" comes closest) but here's a 10-min clip of Neil Postman talking about i…
Random post #743447
Came across this article from six years ago, on the hilarity, or seriousness, and the need, or abuse, of "emotional support animals". The author managed to get an exemption for carrying aro…
On electronic self-absorption
(Quote from the Thought Catalog collection 2010-2015)…
Rango
Stumbled across “Rango” while scrolling through Netflix and … yes, this was clearly the Great American Movie. Nothing before or after merits that title, for me. The opening: We are gathered here to…
Human Mental Games
Was watching Queen’s Gambit today (up to four episodes now), and realized how different the attitude to chess (and perhaps Go too) would’ve been back then. Today, in a post-Deep Blue, post-Alpha Go,…
A prescient interview by Aldous Huxley
Remember, this interview was filmed just over six decades ago, and reference a book written nine decades ago (Brave New World). Of course, his interviewer is humoring him and not quite taking him ser…
Thoughts on continuing to use Twitter
Context In a previous post1, I mentioned how my experience of Twitter is actually quite nice and I don’t encounter any of the craziness that other people report. Is that still true? Well, yes and no…
Random note: 198432
A could of random selections from the backmatter of the graphic novel omnibus "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"…