Browse Topics

Sunbeams

Why 300,000 varieties of beetles? The great English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane was once cornered by a distinguished theologian who asked him what inferences one could draw, from a study of the created world, as to the nature of its Creator. Haldane answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

David Quammen

Sunbeams

Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.

Malcolm de Chazal

My Machines

There is a man I talk to in the Astor Place subway stop. He lives there, and he’s missing a tooth. Today his hair was wound around sticks.

The Seduction Of Consciousness

We don’t have a “drug” problem. We have never had a “drug” problem. We will not have a “virtual reality” problem. Past, present, and future, we have a consciousness problem — today compounded by the fact that it happens to be occurring in a Neanderthal political landscape.

Bad Magic: The Failure Of Technology

An Interview With Jerry Mander

In this culture, we have science and technology as religion. We no longer have a religious or philosophical basis for making choices regarding the evolution of technology. All those decisions are made in the corporate world.

TV Guide

I took a job in an area lacking electricity. Our daughters were two and four when we moved, and had had almost no contact with television. We lived for the next nine years without television.

Sunbeams

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Imagination Itself

Cosmic Mysteries, Cosmic Hype

A Hard Look At The New Age

There is no “new age,” or every age is a “new age.” Every randomly defined period of history is (of course) “new” when it is happening; yet all periods of history are subject to the eternal return of events and meanings. If we try to name the features by which observers declare a present new age, we find only some of the oldest and most conservative human activities: millennialism, the sacred earth, channeling and mediumship, communication with nonhuman entities, ritual participation in food and medicine, faith healing, and shamanism. These were also hallmarks of the so-called Sixties revival, a new age which was partially eclipsed by the materialism of the late Seventies.

The Telephone

Anna Karenina, the Peace Corps, long-distance rates