Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Sometimes, e.g. when I look around a Skytrain car and see people’s faces lit in the unholy glow of iPad screens (see “Digital bedlam”)—when I notice the wires dangling from people’s heads, the animated conversations with invisible presences on the part of people sporting no visible gadgetry at all, the poke-poking and thumbing of games and messages and searches for the meaning of life—it seems to me that these changes in our behavior have been sudden. Just last … Read more
Chicken Little epidemic
Our streets appear increasingly aswarm with Chicken Little financial savants.
All around the world, it seems, a hard rain is about to fall. The sky is gravid with precipitate disaster, and quite a few people are reviewing plans to build financial arks, many of these latter-day Noahs figuring they’ll build their boats of gold.
And good luck to them. One advantage of being a starving writer in a state of perennial penury—blessed with a principled resistance to … Read more