technology 150

Going to the gym? Call a friend. Running an errand? Send a text. Eating something interesting? Take a picture and show the world on Facebook.

What a trifling thing it is to control man! How easily we believe in fairy tales when they come cloaked in the black box of authority and superior knowledge.

Nostalgia is, therefore, an index of alienation, communal decrepitude, and, at high levels, cultural patricide.

The general continued to pay for the upkeep of the LSU tiger in an airconditioned cage. The amount of money involved was almost precisely the same as the subsidy for…

Beautifully and substantially-made books suggest something that deserve to be pored over at length, just as one lingers with friends after a wonderful meal.

Why not stand on the shoulders of the Kindle?

Here’s a sign of the times: if you’re worried about what all these digital and internet technologies are going to do to books, you can join a movement to signal…

We need not rely with some desperation on the Hope that is a gift, if we can gin up optimism of our own sort.

Claremont, CA. When my mother came to visit last week, she brought a copy of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union with her. Before she departed for the airport this morning, she…

Claremont, CA. If you don’t want to read the new report from Harvard Business School, titled “Understanding Users of Social Networks,” you can just listen to the song from Avenue…

Rock Island, IL In the early days of FPR, and then again more recently, I was impertinent enough to write disparaging remarks about cell phones, which as everyone knows are…

Holland, MI. I confess: I hate farms. I hate everything about them. I hate the malodorous smells that take days to wash off. I hate the all-pervasive dirt which invades…

Rock Island, IL “Morning Cyanide” is a fun game for the whole family. The best thing about it is this: not everyone has to be awake at the same time…

Washington, Connecticut. The urge, some might say mania with which our species has attempted to distance itself from Nature is a defining occupation and it appears to be quickening in…

“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house.  I got up from the wooden bench on which…

Coeur d'Alene, ID. One evening our family and two cousins were playing Uno. It’s a simple game requiring nothing more than a deck of Uno cards. We’ve played this game…

Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice. (Brookings Institution) Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. (Simone Weil) Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. There are a lot of conspiracy…

Claremont, CA. A student has confronted me about Front Porch Republic. So now  I'm writing the post that I've known I would have to write someday. "It just doesn't seem…

Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning – an imaginative rendering of our…

Phoenix, Arizona. Because of my involvement with this darn site I have been attending to the blogosphere much more than heretofore, and lately have been trying to get a handle…

Claremont, CA.   Becka flew into my office, so excited that she was out of breath. "Professor," she asked, "have you heard about freedom?" I couldn't help laughing. "Why yes, Becka,"…

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. About a week ago our dishwasher started to issue a loud grinding sound from its hidden depths. After a few days I decided to call an appliance…

April was "Media Awareness Month" at our sons' school. I took a couple weeks off from the Porch, and I also published a first draft of this piece in the…

The obscuring of the faith in creation is a fundamental part of what constitutes modernity. As I survey all the perplexing shifts in the spiritual landscape of today, only these…