Daniel Rourke /stream

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Douglas Trumbull, the Academy-Award winning visual master behind such films as "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Blade Runner," "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and "The Tree…

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Just think about the ordinary, and by that I mean not an ordinary life, event, custom, or thing (at least not yet), but the ordinary as such. We can never fully…

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Craig Venter is scientist/entrepreneur and founded the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization that announced in May 2010 they had successfully constructed the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial…

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Our Top 10 of 2013. No. 1: more and more of modern life is steered by algorithms. But what are they exactly, and who is behind them? Tom Whipple follows the…

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If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies…

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The road to a PhD is a common source of frustration. It is time to acknowledge and contest this experience as the outcome of a disciplinarian process. As a faceless PhD…

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“Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments and to integrate the individual into a technological world” (Ellul xvii). How might future research into digital…

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Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New…

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Metaphor wants to be… ‘[...] metaphors work to change people’s minds. Orators have known this since Demosthenes. [...] But there’s precious little evidence that they tell you what people think. [...]…

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Peter Suchin reappraises the prismatic works of Roland Barthes – an author who defied his own pronouncement of the designation’s demise. From the Marxist of Mythologies to the ‘scientist’ of S/Z,…

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Anyone who can read German can read the first book ever printed. If you can read Sumerian cuneiform, you can read clay tablets that were probably the first things ever written.…

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The persistent glitchiness of HealthCare.gov, the website implementing the Affordable Care Act, has given us much time to ponder that peculiar little word, glitch. As it happens, some new research on…

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Recently, a close friend sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Things I’ve Noticed As I Get Older.

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Douglas Trumbull, the Academy-Award winning visual master behind such films as "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Blade Runner," "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and "The Tree…

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Late one night last August, on the chalk downlands of southern England, Paul Kingsnorth stood in a field beside an old-growth forest, two yurts and a composting toilet. Kingsnorth is 41,…

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Just think about the ordinary, and by that I mean not an ordinary life, event, custom, or thing (at least not yet), but the ordinary as such. We can never fully…

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Craig Venter is scientist/entrepreneur and founded the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization that announced in May 2010 they had successfully constructed the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial…

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Many of Benjamin’s articles read like flânerie reports. Focused on a particular city, his reports are part-psychological, part-cultural, part-geographical. Often, he is reflecting as much on his impressions and the memories or thoughts…

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If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies…

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In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan uses the metaphor of the mythological Prometheus to frame his discussion on posthumanism and positions him as a trickster with a…

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“Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments and to integrate the individual into a technological world” (Ellul xvii). How might future research into digital…

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Metaphor wants to be… ‘[...] metaphors work to change people’s minds. Orators have known this since Demosthenes. [...] But there’s precious little evidence that they tell you what people think. [...]…

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Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change,…

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Anyone who can read German can read the first book ever printed. If you can read Sumerian cuneiform, you can read clay tablets that were probably the first things ever written.…

Bookmark

The persistent glitchiness of HealthCare.gov, the website implementing the Affordable Care Act, has given us much time to ponder that peculiar little word, glitch. As it happens, some new research on…