Daniel Rourke /stream

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To say that Marshall McLuhan was incidentally a Christian, or that his Catholicism was just part of his private life, is a little like saying that Karl Marx was only incidentally…

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Let’s face it: reading stories about the ongoing destruction of planet Earth, the life-sustaining blue marble that all of us – aside from maybe Elon Musk – are permanently trapped on,…

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“Men have to toughen up,” Jordan B. Peterson writes in 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, “Men demand it, and women want it.” So, the first rule is, “Stand…

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Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6…

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Let’s talk about what it means to destroy yourself. In the relatively short time I’ve been alive, I have made an art out of self-destruction. I’ve placed myself in frightening situations…

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In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any…

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Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

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Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the…

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The job of clearing out her father’s house after his death led Jo Cooke to discover more about his childhood in Poland and strange behaviour – a process that helped her…

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‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.

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A series of energy revolutions—some natural, some technological—built upon one another to give us our rich, diverse biosphere.

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Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach.

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The human is always already posthuman. The human is the animal that relies on technology in order to realize its humanity. The “post-human” is thus an ontological category, more than a…

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How is the ecological predicament of the 21st century to be conceived of? Politically, how is it to be confronted, and by whom? The basic features of the problem are plain…

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You see, what we’re talkin’ about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates ‘em perfectly. –Dr. Blair, The Thing

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To say that Marshall McLuhan was incidentally a Christian, or that his Catholicism was just part of his private life, is a little like saying that Karl Marx was only incidentally…

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I logged into "Second Life" in the year 2018 A.D. It still exists, sort of. Residents and businesses began fleeing for more popular social networks long ago. Vast acres of land…

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“Men have to toughen up,” Jordan B. Peterson writes in 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, “Men demand it, and women want it.” So, the first rule is, “Stand…

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Bots are everywhere. From simple algorithms and aggregator bots to complex “artificially” intelligent machine-learning systems, they have become inescapable. Some are in chat programs.

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In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any…

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Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

Bookmark

Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the…

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In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note…

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The job of clearing out her father’s house after his death led Jo Cooke to discover more about his childhood in Poland and strange behaviour – a process that helped her…

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‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.

Bookmark

The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics.

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A series of energy revolutions—some natural, some technological—built upon one another to give us our rich, diverse biosphere.

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Silicon Valley is coming for death. But it’s looking in the wrong place. After disrupting the way we love, communicate, travel, work, and even eat, technologists believe they can solve the…

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The human is always already posthuman. The human is the animal that relies on technology in order to realize its humanity. The “post-human” is thus an ontological category, more than a…

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You see, what we’re talkin’ about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates ‘em perfectly. –Dr. Blair, The Thing