The reason Socrates banished laughter or comedy from the poetry of the just city is that comedians, at their best, remind us of what we all know: there is an inexpressible sadness just beneath the surface of all our happy talk, and that means there are limits to how much any of us can be [...]
Will the world end with a bang, or just a whimper, as T.S. Eliot predicted? Or will nobody notice at all? An eerie silence, as everyone listens to an endless stream of digital music on their iPods. Gradually, step by step, with the advance of computer technology, real things are being replaced by images of [...]
Raphael’s School of Athens The humanities in American higher education are in deep crisis, and the cry of alarm released on June 18 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences will probably contribute little to a renaissance. How deep is the crisis? Here a few warning signals. According to the New York [...]
by Stephen Masty A 1960s/1970s comedian from before entertainment was invented, Rodney Dangerfield, had a catch-phrase complaining “I don’t get no respect.” American conservatives, outside of their own small communities, could make the same gripe. Until now. According to industrial leaks, Google, the cutting-edge IT company, is already designing a second-generation of its highly-anticipated Google [...]
My habit was this—wake up, make breakfast with my wife, and as she was going to work, I would read the day’s headlines from the “news,” and we would talk about it over the phone. Over recent months, especially the last several days, I felt like I was reading more news, and watching more news, [...]
I distinctly remember reading Jacques Ellul’s books on technology, and specifically even remember where I was sitting when I read his The Technological Bluff, where he essentially argues that it is all but over and people will give over to the tidal wave of technology/technique. Here we are more than twenty years later, and if [...]
Permit me to offer you some desultory reflections concerning the effect of the electronic computer upon the reason and the imagination. We are told by many voices that the computer will work a revolution in learning. So it may; but that accomplishment would not be salutary. The primary end of the higher learning, in all [...]
We seem to be haunted by the fear of our machinery and what it is doing to us, or what might happen when it goes wrong. According to landmarks of popular culture such as the Terminator and Matrix movies and Battlestar Galactica, sooner or later the machines will turn upon us. They will use us [...]
Below is the December Macworld Cover planned for December 2011 issue. Enough said. […]
In the world of constant communication, few of us would say that we enjoy a free relationship to technology. But according to the language of political liberty, we do. Liberty frees us to use technology and accept its benefits, or to avoid it and suffer the consequences. Yet liberty and technology are more deeply implicated [...]
Readers of The Imaginative Conservative might be interested in a few pieces floating around the internet this morning. Jim Otteson offers—rather naturally—an excellent critique of the new college rankings as decreed by Forbes. His article can be found at Pileus. The New York Times has a fascinating piece on Danish "austerity" measures. The Danish government has [...]
Forgive the scattershot tendencies and directions of this essay. Just lots of short items written quickly from my hotel room in downtown Portland, just blocks from Powells (which I’ve yet to visit). A few book recommendations I’m currently reading Sam Gregg’s new book, Wilhelm Roepke’s Political Economy. Written in a more academic but equally engaging style [...]