Tag: technology

The Very Online Culture Wars

The Very Online Right might be riding high now, but I anticipate that the election jackpot of the moment will not last and that this victory will soon look more like Las Vegas at noon, beaten down and tawdry under the merciless exposure of the midday western sun.

Two Cheers for E-Bikes

Automobiles shield you from the outside world, its sounds, its colors. But on my bike, I encounter my environment directly.

The Final Word was Right

If there ever comes a true accounting of the costs we’re racking up for making, using, and discarding our mobile (de)vices, we will be obliged to admit that there has been no net gain. The withdrawals from the account exceed the deposits in both number and in sum.

Large Language Models and the Final Paragraph

Like the sonnet, the five-paragraph essay traps investment in truth felt in the heart and forged in the mind by means of its life-respecting limitations.

Steel-Manning the Amish: The Wisdom of Communal Discernment

What the Amish understand perhaps more than we do is the necessity of maintaining and protecting domains of embodied human agency in our lives.

Twenty-Six Theses on Textual Technologies

Language is primarily a relational (rather than a representational) technology. Words articulate our relationships to God, other humans, our environment, and even ourselves.

On Not Losing Our Minds to Technology

A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love.

Seeing the Stars: A Review of The Anxious Generation

If the sky clears above us, we won’t suddenly find ourselves saints. But at least, perhaps, we’ll be able to see the stars.

How to Have a Baby in the Apocalypse

It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question — whether to have children in this age of climate change — springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world apart, the idea that humans are in charge.

The Heartbreak behind the EEG

Modern physicians use Hans Berger’s invention to save lives every day