Author: Justin

Zoolander replicant Andrew Keen strives to prolong his fifteen minutes. Eastern European sophistication is called upon… Now the politics of the Great Seduction is truly out of the bag. In a provocative piece in In These Times, cultural iconoclast Slavoj Zizek gets to the political heart of the digital matter. Zizek explains why post French…

She will be sorely missed. If any of our alleged “cultural critics” could be said to have any value at all, then Jane Jacobs would surely exemplify the best of that small subset. I don’t have a single unkind thing to say about her. The woman had a marvelous way of looking at things, a…

An excerpt from When the Sleeper Wakes, first published in 1899. Emphases are mine… He observed one entire side of the outer room was set with rows of peculiar double cylinders inscribed with green lettering on white that harmonized With the decorative scheme of the room, and in the centre of this side projected a…

Cause it’s Earth Day again. Where did the time go? Without further ado, here’s last years Earth Day post, exhumed and propped up, all green and stinking. “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think…

The Symbolic Systems Program is pleased to host the Singularity Summit at Stanford University, a rare gathering of thinkers to explore the rising impact of science and technology on society. The summit has been organized to further the understanding of a controversial idea ? the singularity scenario. This looks too good to miss. Pity I…

In 1970, Paul Ehrlich said this… I’m scared. I have a 14 year old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed. My world is being destroyed. I’m 37 and I’d kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world,…

Here’s a little something from the pages of “The Great Seduction“… Rushing back to the Bay Area, now known as Silicon Valley, I founded a website called Audiocafe and, securing investment from Intel and SAP, built it into an early paragon of the online revolution. Um, about that word? Paragon? It strikes me as being…

The following announcement may be of grave importance. Or not. Andrew Keen has a new blog portrait. I shall quite miss the old one. The vivacious, sinewy way that he twisted his neck, gone forever, down the memory hole. I’m the tiniest bit distraught. Luckily, his baleful “butchest man in the Royal Navy” come hither…

Click here…

He has managed to merge the social relevance of Leon Kass with the trenchant historical insight of Jeremy Rifkin.

Both long time readers and new acquaintences who’ve delved into our archives may be familiar with James Kunstler. I’ve taken him to task more than once, and thoroughly enjoyed doing so. What the sane well-adjusted reader, fully engaged in his or her life, may not realize is that Mr. Kunstler is merely the tip of…

You may have already seen this on Instapundit, but on the off chance that you missed it, check out this pack mule robot from Boston Dynamics. It’s one of four different models, and though it creeps me out just a bit, it also makes me laugh. Check out the video. I swear, the thing appears…

Australian researchers have knowingly violated the laws of Man and God. Their doom is sealed, their fate horrific. Just kidding. In a major step towards understanding prostate disease, Melbourne scientists have grown a human prostate from embryonic stem cells. …human embryonic stem cells were developed into human prostate tissue equivalent to that found in a…

I mentioned back in November that Vernor Vinge’s latest novel, Rainbows End, would be available on May 16th. Unless of course you’re the Instapundit, in which case you’ve already got a copy. Sure wish he’d hurry up and finish it… At any rate, they’ve moved the date up by a couple of weeks. The new…

James Kunstler has repaired his archives! The Krispy Kremer werewolf quote is restored to all its former glory… September 19, 2005 Take a good look at America around you now, because when we emerge from the winter of 2005 – 6, we’re going to be another country. The reality-oblivious nation of mall hounds, bargain shoppers,…

A commenter on these pages has given me some food for thought… It is such a simple matter, really. It was rude. It was in bad taste. It was intentionally hurtful and designed to spit on a culture’s sacred icon. Someone may have “a right” to write and publish cartoons that insult a billion people.…

I’m sitting in a coffee shop, trying to crank out a post, and the management has put on an old Cat Stevens album. At this very second, I’m enduring “Peace Train”. The irony.

In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria. Conditioned to respond to every threat, In the terrorist speeches on the internet. Zarqawi says “We will behead you.” I don’t subscribe to this point of view. It would be such an impolite thing to do. If the Muslims looooove their children too. How can…

If you’re looking for a few hopeful signs in this sadly diminished world, you could do worse than to visit Green Car Congress. Interestingly, their name doesn’t say it all. They don’t limit themselves to cars. Far from it. It was at Green Car Congress that I first heard of the Green Goat hybrid switching…

Via Worldchanging, an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor. Bolted onto the exhaust stacks of a brick-and-glass 20-megawatt power plant behind MIT’s campus are rows of fat, clear tubes, each with green algae soup simmering inside. Fed a generous helping of CO2-laden emissions, courtesy of the power plant’s exhaust stack, the algae grow quickly…