The Titanic as symbol
Edward Tenner has a piece in The Atlantic about the Titanic's continued importance in Ireland as "an icon of the vanished glories of Belfast shipbuilding at its peak."
Robert Darnton on “a font of proverbial nonwisdom”
Robert Darnton challenges "five myths about the information age" that, taken together, "constitute a font of proverbial nonwisdom." "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in
History of technology, key to the future
One of the truisms about futures is that insights can come from all kinds of unusual places and unexpected corners of the world. This morning I ran across
Living history: on the politics of reenactment
An Ohio congressional candidate turns out to have been a Nazi reenactor, though he claims he only did it as "a father-son bonding thing." (WTF)? I grew up
If you think history doesn’t matter
This observation from The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about the expert witnesses in Perry: in the findings of fact Judge Walker ended up relying almost exclusively on the
Memory arts and mindware
Ruth Evans takes an historical perspective on Andy Clark's natural-born cyborgs argument, and that "human cognition is not just embodied but embedded: not mind in body, but both
Donald Michael and the problem of retrospection in futures
Recently I came across a discarded copy of a pamphlet by Donald Michael, Cybernation: The Silent Conquest. Michael was part of that generation of American social scientists that
From Mighty Mouse to Magic Mouse
Just over four years ago, Apple came out with the Mighty Mouse, its now-standard multi-button mouse with a scroll ball. I talked about the mouse as a canonical
Journeyman again
Preface (1999) No one has born the weight of the decade's terrible academic job market more than young Ph.D.s. Caught between a culture that insists they cannot leave