Neil M. Richards, law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education: We were living in an age of surveillance before the Boston Marathon bombing, but the event and its investigation produced calls for much greater monitoring of our cities and our lives. The media narrative of the investigation,…
Disruption, catastrophe, and resilience in a hyperfast, hyperconnected world
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a thought-provoking examination of the ins and outs, both philosophical and practical, of the contemporary reality of disasters, catastrophes, and “resilience” — a word and concept that, as the article points out, is currently all the rage among scholars and policy wonks: In all, [Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear…
Steven Soderbergh on “present shock” and the state of cinema
If you’re interested in books and ideas that explore the soul of a culture and civilization that in many ways seems to be flinging itself apart at the seams — and I know this describes most Teeming Brain readers — then be advised that Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, published in March,…
Flying cars and the “world of tomorrow” that never was
You know all of those excellent articles and essays that have appeared in recent months to explore the rosy science fiction-esque visions of our real-world future that characterized American culture during most of the 20th century? (Recall that we noted one of the best of them, David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate…
‘Monarchs of Money’: How central bankers became the new ruling class
A new short documentary from the CBC titled The Monarchs of Money explains in hair-raising and gut-punching detail how “The world’s central banks have printed unimaginable amounts of money in recent years. Neil Macdonald explores what this means for the global economy and for your financial well-being.” There’s also an accompanying written report, billed as…
H. P. Lovecraft: A rabidly racist, almost fascist, deeply repressed, and perfectly lovely person
Despite a number of stylistic and grammatical/syntactical gaffes and oddities that appear in a newly published biographical sketch of dear old Howard Lovecraft at the Website Machinations into Madness — see especially the first sentence quoted below, which is both incomprehensible and strangely fascinating — the piece captures something really vital about the man, or…
Alan Watts: “The Real You”
“It’s absolutely necessary that we let go of ourselves, and it can’t be done, not by anything that we call ‘doing it’ — acting, willing, or even just accepting things. . . . When you look out of your eyes at nature happening ‘out there,’ you’re looking at you. That’s the real you, the you…
Recommended Reading 39
This week: the dystopian potential of the “big data” revolution, and the need for a deliberate preservation of the sphere of the specifically human in the new reality of a true “information society.” The ubiquitous danger of untested chemicals in the products comprising most Americans’ daily lives. S. T. Joshi on H. P. Lovecraft’s enduring…
The hidden face of the age as discerned by a priestly confessor
Here’s Tomáš Halík, the Czech public intellectual, Roman Catholic priest, and scholar who was persecuted by the secret police as an “enemy of the regime” during his country’s communist period, and who later served as an advisor to Vaclav Havel, talking about the fundamental outlook of the collective contemporary soul as he has come to…
The dying roots and sacred origin of Western culture
British classical scholar Peter Kingsley is widely known for having achieved mainstream academic credibility in his field before launching out in a new direction by writing several books in which he argues that (in the words of Wikipedia) “the writings of the presocratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles, usually seen as rational or scientific enterprises, were…