Don DeLillo's novels suggest that the fundamental yearning that underlies all action, the creation and the destruction of civilizations, is the yearning to escape personal mortality. But the feats of modern science have tempted some to believe that science can defy human mortality altogether. Continue Reading »
The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousnessby david gelernterliveright, 320 pages, $26.95 What in the end makes The Tides of Mind a brave and exemplary book is not so much Gelernter’s conclusions as his method. It has become fashionable among computationalists and others to argue . . . . Continue Reading »
We appeal to other animals to help us arrive at self-understanding in these perplexing times. But we struggle to understand non-humans in a productive way. Therefore we cannot ultimately understand ourselves. Continue Reading »
Updating Henry Adams's famous meditation on technology and tradition. Continue Reading »
Humans are distinct in our capacity to extend ourselves into tools and concepts. Continue Reading »
Twenty-three years ago, under the pseudonym Catherine Maurice, a woman wrote a book about recovering her small daughter from autism. Still in print, the book is called Let Me Hear Your Voice, a quotation from the Song of Songs, God’s love song to humanity. In 1993 autism was not the byword it is . . . . Continue Reading »
How slot machines moves from margin to center of “gaming.” Continue Reading »
For the Frenchmen who lived through World War II, the defining event of their lives was quintessentially political. It was the great refusal, embodied by General Charles de Gaulle, to accept the defeat of June 1940. With that refusal came a determined commitment to reestablish national sovereignty. . . . . Continue Reading »
A venerable rule of predication is that certain words—or, at least, certain homonymous terms—admit of univocal, equivocal, and analogical acceptations. That is to say, there are times when a term has precisely the same meaning in two or more discrete instances of its use: say, “blue” as . . . . Continue Reading »
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