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Ambitious Nihilism

The Palo Alto suicides started in 2002, when Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto High School class of 2007 and author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, must have been in middle school. I, a year ahead in the class of 2006, was adjusting to the awkward realities of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Recovering Our Memory

We have no hope that we can raise the next generation to be entirely innocent of Silicon Valley’s tyrannical devices, but if we can teach them to treasure the world of books, we will keep alive in them the world of memory.  Continue Reading »

The Fateful Nineties

For Americans, the 1990s are both the most sharply defined and the most fuzzily understood of modern decades. The nineties began on 11/9/1989, with the breaching of the Berlin Wall by East Germans—a symbolic repudiation of communism and a glorious American victory in the Cold War. They ended . . . . Continue Reading »

Surviving the Metaverse

My childhood religious education was, you might say, haphazard. I met many of the most famous Bible verses for the first time not in church, or through a family member, but in Handel’s Messiah, which I listened to so many times as a youth that I memorized much of the libretto. But somewhat . . . . Continue Reading »

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