Here is what I learned from the article* about Amazon in the New York Times: Amazon is the place where your performance is constantly monitored with the latest metrics and you better not have a baby or get cancer. And where you embrace the “purposeful Darwinism” that encourages you to rat out your fellow employees [...]
From Adam and Eve to Eddie Cochrane, from earning your daily bread by the sweat of your brow to the summertime blues and beyond, work has always been the scourge of existence. A recent essay in The Atlantic suggests that Genesis is about to be reversed and the curse lifted. According to Derek Thompson, humanity, [...]
Ask yourself an odd question: “How conservative is my refrigerator?” Or, ask this of your car, your television, your tablet. Ask this of any number of things around the house. At first pass, this might sound unusual, if not ridiculous, because we generally don’t think of things as having behaviors or expressing particular ideas or [...]
(Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series, affords our readers the opportunity to join Professor Stratford Caldecott as he goes beyond the artistic elements of comics and marvels at the questions begged by their narration—questions concerning the meaning of life and the relationship between man and technology. —Alyssa M. Barnes, Editorial Assistant) The imagination of the child [...]
Since the nineteenth century, a widespread misunderstanding regarding the relationship between science and Christianity has persisted. The error is a common conviction that military metaphors provide the most accurate means for describing the engagement between the Christian faith and modern science. Historians of science employ the term conflict thesis, which in its strongest version “provides [...]
Vinod Khosia has managed* to say a lot in a few words about the consequences of “the next technology revolution.” Let me just list some points for discussion: 1. That revolution comes when it’s finally possible to construct “systems with judgment and decision-making capability more sophisticated and nuanced than trained human judgment.” And it’s coming [...]
This is the story of three young men struggling for fame and fortune in the IT sector; finding one another and building a team, adapting the newest technology, injecting their own creativity, raising venture capital and applying painstaking effort, launching their product, outmanoeuvring competitors and rocketing to success—in the 15th Century! Parallels between the Early [...]
Wondering about human height led me to more unfashionable thoughts. We seem to be getting taller. My virtually six-foot college sweetheart was exceptionally tall for young women in the 1970s, but that seems close to average among today’s co-eds. The anecdote seems accurate—American men around age twenty who enlisted in the Great War were four [...]
Like many of my generation (Baby Boomers) I am something of a late adopter when it comes to certain technologies. I have owned an iPad for several years now, which I use mainly to receive and send email when I’m on the go. But I was surprised during a family get-together about ten days ago, [...]
What happens when we enter a world of constant connection—a world in which technology infiltrates nearly every moment of our waking existence? “We all feel the porcupine quill of constant contact, the irritant of ever presence, and long to escape, if only for a moment,” Rabbi David Wolpe writes for TIME Magazine. But Wolpe also [...]
So thanks to Carl for talking up Carson Holloway, The Imaginative Conservative, and civilized leisure. Carson is also a forceful opponent of judicial supremacy. That is the view that the Court says what the Constitution is, the view that fuels the renewed focus on (libertarian) judicial activism. The Court does not, in fact, have to [...]
An increasing number of Americans are looking to social media and online dating sites like Tinder or OKCupid to meet potential romantic partners. In a Friday column, David Brooks reviews the data presented by the book Dataclysm, written by the creator of OKCupid: People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who [...]
The written word has obviously been crucial to the preservation and development of Western civilization. Without the invention of the alphabet and the printing press, or the widespread use of writing, you would not have access to the minds of those who contributed to Western thought. Considering that you live in a culture sculpted and hewn [...]
It is hard not to think of ourselves as the users of technology, especially since technology forms a core part of the image of our freedom. Liberty and freedom are things that we have. Depending what definition we use, liberty describes a natural faculty to do what we want, denotes the absence of external impediments, [...]