MachineMachine /stream

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Philip K. Dick’s admittedly peculiar but passionately held worldview and the gnosticism it embodies does more than explain what some call the dystopian turn in science fiction from the 1960s…

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APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews,…

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Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of…

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That headline flashed to all corners of the media universe this month. Of course, we don't know whether a universe has corners. Truth is, we don't know much about the…

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You may have heard of determinism, the theory that absolutely everything that happens is causally determined to happen exactly as it does by what has already gone before — right…

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A starry firmament, or sand cascading through one’s open fingers, or weeds springing up time after time: the first conception of infinity, of the uncountable and the unending, is not…

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When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee,…

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I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply…

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The Exegesis, much anticipated by fans of the writer, will come out in autumn 2011, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt revealed. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53,…

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It is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom. At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe…

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Theology lets us talk about deep and irrational urges. This is seen by some atheists as weakness. But maybe it's a strength as well James Wood, a writer who himself…