The important thing is to control technology since it becomes abusive when it starts controlling us. Thus, if email overload is causing concern, it is time to implement some version of detox. There is life beyond the Internet…. On January 1, 2017, I made a New Year’s resolution to make my Sundays Internet free. This [...]
In the post-truth society, your facts are not my facts, and lies by political figures are greeted with indifference. Judged by past standards, citizens of a post-truth society have no real experience and no capacity for critical thinking. We Americans have virtually no interest in history; for us, the past pales in comparison with the [...]
Given the choice, people would rather watch flat-out conflict and crosstalk rather than a more plodding format of elevated discourse and sober deliberation… The documentary film Best of Enemies (2015) is not just a compelling chronicle and contextualization of the famous 1968 television debates between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal. As the sequence [...]
For anyone to hold “the media” in contempt—for example, over “fake news”—is nothing but a bizarre form of self-loathing… In this digital age of polarized politics, where can we look for guidance on how to turn down the heat? After all, we don’t want to blow ourselves up. Fortunately, although the imperative to use our [...]
As we retreat into our respective corners to enjoy the things we enjoy, we enjoy less and less in common with one another. The bonds that hold us together are loosening… Few things have changed day-to-day American life as much as the free flow of digital entertainment and information from producers to consumers over the [...]
The humanities can fill us with a kind of reverent admiration for a place in its particularity, and fill us with a delight that such a thing exists, untouched, un-owned by us. It can help us open our grasping hands and let beauty be, whether or not it is possessed by me… I would like [...]
There seems to be very little cultural space for humanistic studies. It is difficult to perceive how literature, philosophy, or theology could contribute to technological capitalism… I would like you to imagine the following situation: Sometime after graduation a college student is hired as an intern at his university’s newly founded Center for Leadership Studies [...]
“The world exists to end in a book” — Stéphane Mallarmé “Happy is your Grace, That can translate the stubbornness of fortune Into so quiet and so sweet a style.” —Shakespeare, As You Like It (II.i.19-21) “Prayer is reversed thunder.” —George Herbert In Chapter 6 of Understanding Media (1964), “Media as Translators,” Marshall McLuhan starts [...]
In 2016 Americans are feeling anxious. It’s not that we are experiencing crises—we are neither in total war nor economic depression. Yet 2016 has forced us to rethink all we thought we knew. A Socialist made a credible run for the Democratic nomination and succeeded in moving the Democratic Party platform farther left than it [...]
American businessmen are inhumane. I do not mean that they are inhuman; they are all too human. I do not mean that they are insufficiently humanitarian. I mean that American businessmen, like most other Americans, are deficient in the disciplines that nurture the spirit. They are largely ignorant of the humanities, which, in a word, [...]
“There’s Nothing Like a Best Seller to Set Hollywood a-Tingle” —The New York Times Book Review (Sep 16, 1962) “I’d willingly start my next novel—about a small town—right now, but I need the diversion of a play.” —John O’Hara, The New York Times Book Review (Nov 27, 1955) “For most of our lifetime civil war [...]
He could not go. He wanted neither to eat nor to sleep. Only to lie there — eyes insatiably Gazing into the eyes that were no eyes. This is how his own eyes destroyed him. — Ted Hughes, “Narcissus” […]
The West shall shake the East awake While ye have the night for morn. — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake 企者不立；跨者不行； 自見者不明；自是者不彰； 自伐者無功；自矜者不長。 其在道也，曰：餘食贅行。 物或惡之，故有道者不處。 — Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, Chapter 24 […]
Recently, I went with a group of friends to a concert of American choral music based on black spirituals. At the intermission, my friends and I spoke excitedly about what we experienced. The sole musician amongst us praised the balance of the ensemble and the conductor’s energy. One woman noticed how nervous the lead soprano [...]