In his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus, released in hardcover with the subtitle “Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age” and in paperback with the subtitle “How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators,” Clay Shirky expanded his reputation as everybody’s favorite digital guru by arguing that “new digital technology” — primarily of the social media sort —…
Category: Society & Culture
William Golding: “Words may prove to be the most powerful thing in the world”
Story will always be with us. But story in a physical book, in a sentence what the West means by “a novel” — what of that? Certainly, if the form fails let it go. We have enough complications in life, in art, in literature without preserving dead forms fossilised, without cluttering ourselves with Byzantine sterilities….
Silence, solitude, and self-discovery in an age of mass distraction
“[T]he internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. We are immersed because there’s a constant barrage of stimuli coming at us and we seem to be very much seduced by that kind of constantly changing patterns of visual and auditorial stimuli. When we become immersed in our gadgets, we are immersed in a series…
We must connect our science with our humanity to elevate both
At a minimum, the magnificent cosmos provides some perspective on our parochial, human-created problems, be they social or political. Nature is organized in better ways, from which we can learn. The love of nature can bring us together and help us to appreciate that we are part of something far greater than ourselves. Society has…
Addicted to screens: What cinema has done to us
In his new book The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, film historian David Thomson seriously poses the question of whether our collective and alienating addiction to the multitude of screens (televisions, phones, tablet computers, etc.) that increasingly keep us buffered from the existential reality of the world and people around us may not…
Welcome to Gattaca: The rise of consumer-priced genetic sequencing
Ever since James Watson and Francis Crick cracked the genetic code, scientists have been fascinated by the possibilities of what we might learn from reading our genes. But the power of DNA has also long raised fears — such as those dramatized in the 1997 sci-fi film Gattaca, which depicted a world where “a…
Christianity, Islam, and a call for evangelicals to practice what they preach
The attitude and ideas expressed in this excellent op-ed, aimed specifically at evangelical Christians and co-written by Teeming Brain friend John W. Morehead (proprietor of the always-fantastic Theofantastique), are so very necessary amid the current international conflagration over that hit-job of a negative propaganda film about Islam. Much of the conservative commentary on this event,…
The library as cultural memory bank
I found it important to begin by reminding my audience what a library essentially is: a memory bank. Only thanks to the existence of libraries are we able, as a culture and as a society, to keep remembering our own past. But libraries do much more than just looking back, in nostalgia or otherwise, at…
Russell Brand, Daniel Pinchbeck, and Graham Hancock on psychedelics, consciousness, media, society, and reality
In an event that was mind-expanding (or -blowing) in its own right, simply because it happened, last November Daniel Pinchbeck, Graham Hancock, and Russell Brand (!) teamed up to speak at a Reality Sandwich retreat at the Boulder Mountain Guest Ranch in Utah. They ended up having, in the words of the event’s description at…
Morris Berman reviews “Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?”
Morris Berman — author of The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America, and Why America Failed, and a frequently mentioned source of trenchant (and apocalyptic) cultural criticism here at The Teeming Brain — has offered a characteristically perceptive and incisive review/critique of the new documentary Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? by filmmakers Frances Causey…