From the somewhere beyond a pedicel has pricked the baseboard and attached itself to the telephone. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, a root burrowing outward to the world. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I have permitted this stubborn… Read More ›
technology
Happy Birthday, Compact Disc! (I’m glad you’re dead)
THERE ARE SEVERAL dates you could propose as the birthday of the compact disc. Among them is March 1, 1983, the day the CD was launched in Japan and North America as a successor music storage format to the cassette… Read More ›
The Key Concept
HANS KÜNG, in his book Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View, records the satirical line about the late-Renaissance pope Julius II — the Warrior Pope — in which the commissioner of Michelangelo’s infamous Sistine Chapel ceiling inserts the… Read More ›
Thoughts on the Phone
IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD mall there are fourteen stores in which you may buy a phone. The phones today being sold are, it is true, smart phones — but I wonder how long these shops can carry on, all selling roughly… Read More ›
Whither The Book?
I now have a “Kindle,” which is, for those who do not know this, a device for the purchase and reading of electronic books, or ebooks. In the course of familiarizing myself with the functions and uses of this contraption,… Read More ›
An Interview with Heather Menzies
[The following was first published in ASH Magazine Volume 4 Number 1, Winter 1996.] Your argument, in the book Whose Brave New World?, is that a corporate agenda is “colonizing” the institutions and services upon which we depend in this… Read More ›
Old Things
In an age when many of the analogue technologies are considered obsolete, I am still wedded to the idea of vinyl records, pocket watches, vacuum tubes, and typewriters. I have written the first draft of this essay with a 1967… Read More ›
