Daniel Rourke /stream

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by Niklas Luhmann The source of a distinction's guaranteeing reality lies in its own operative unity. It is, however, precisely as this unity that the distinction cannot be observed--except by means…

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By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as “non-overlapping magisteria” with separate domains — science…

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Andy Denzler does these great paintings that look as though they're highly compressed JPEGs with encoding issues.

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This review appeared in New Worlds in 1966 and as far as I can tell is currently unavailable anywhere else.

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Judging from how the Times magazine’s excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s new book has been one of the most read pieces in the paper for over a week now, the book is…

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Tom McCarthy's rise from an obscure art-house author has been quite spectacular, culminating in C, his third novel, being shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize. In something that can only…

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There are many stories Tom McCarthy chooses not to tell in “C,” his tour de force new novel encompassing the short life of one Serge Carrefax, born at the turn of…

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Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow) says Canada's Baffin Island Inuit "use the same word—'uvatiarru'—to mean both 'in the distant past' and 'in the distant future.' Time, in such cultures, is…

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In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the screen,…

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Is our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, the first cyborg species? Gizmodo/New Scientist has a fascinating article up about how humans evolved as a result of technology. Timothy Taylor, an anthropologist and…

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Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". "Over the past…

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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 back…

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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 recorded,…

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It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an artist;…

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As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change? America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the Constitution,…

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Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley’s favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the US…

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by John Cayley Digital utopianism is still with us. It is with us despite having been tempered by network logistics and an all-too-reasonable demand for 'content.' Admittedly, New Media has aged.…

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Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed…

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Analytic philosophy has a complex history of more than one hundred years and this movement is so variegated that it can hardly be characterized by a single feature. Most of those…

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To test the effects of photographic editing on memory, Slate altered the content or context of five images. The first was a TV screen shot from President Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial,…

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A recent study provides intriguing information about the neural dynamics underlying behavioral changes associated with the development of new problem solving strategies. The research... supports the idea of "a-ha" moments in…

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Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where…

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by Niklas Luhmann The source of a distinction's guaranteeing reality lies in its own operative unity. It is, however, precisely as this unity that the distinction cannot be observed--except by means…

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By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as “non-overlapping magisteria” with separate domains — science…

Bookmark

This review appeared in New Worlds in 1966 and as far as I can tell is currently unavailable anywhere else.

Bookmark

Tom McCarthy's rise from an obscure art-house author has been quite spectacular, culminating in C, his third novel, being shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize. In something that can only…

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Good sense is the most fairly distributed commodity in the world, Descartes once quipped, because nobody thinks he needs any more of it than he already has. A neat illustration of…

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Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow) says Canada's Baffin Island Inuit "use the same word—'uvatiarru'—to mean both 'in the distant past' and 'in the distant future.' Time, in such cultures, is…

Bookmark

In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the screen,…

Bookmark

Is our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, the first cyborg species? Gizmodo/New Scientist has a fascinating article up about how humans evolved as a result of technology. Timothy Taylor, an anthropologist and…

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Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". "Over the past…

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In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering…

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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 recorded,…

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By the twentieth century, some cynicism had crept into descriptions of the newest machines. Writing about the impact of radio on his rural Maine community, E. B. White observed, "One of…

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As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change? America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the Constitution,…

Bookmark

Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley’s favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the US…

Bookmark

by John Cayley Digital utopianism is still with us. It is with us despite having been tempered by network logistics and an all-too-reasonable demand for 'content.' Admittedly, New Media has aged.…

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Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed…

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Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable…

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To test the effects of photographic editing on memory, Slate altered the content or context of five images. The first was a TV screen shot from President Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial,…

Bookmark

Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where…