Category: Technology
The Tech-Wise Family Challenge
My wife and I read Andy Crouch’s The Tech-Wise Family last year and really enjoyed it. (We have also really enjoyed putting some of its recommendations into practice! Now, there’s a 21-day challenge you can do with your family, starting...
Sabbath and soil
Years ago, when I first studied Isaiah 58, I found its call to honor the Sabbath mingled with the call to do away with violence and injustice odd. I suppose that I had grown up thinking of Sabbath-keeping as a...
video killed the #1 burger joint in the country
This is a really sad story that I think is ultimately about power, technology, and the way in which media shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us: In my office, I have a coffee mug from Stanich’s...
“The FDA’s Mango-Flavored Trolley Problem”
Don’t you just love that headline? These competing concerns leave the FDA trying to thread a particularly tricky needle: How do they get these products into the hands of the people who need them, while keeping them away from people...
we need a twenty-first century Comstock
Helen Andrews is at The Hedgehog Review with a review of a book on Anthony Comstock and censorship, subtly calling for a new Comstock for our brave new world of pornography: The problem of pornography has never been worse than it...
even surgeons agree: we hate EMRs!
Atul Gawande jumps on the anti-EMR bandwagon, and it’s a very satisfying read: There’s a techno-optimist view of how this story will unfold. Big technology companies are already circling to invest in IKS Health. They see an opportunity for artificial...
“making human life safe for human beings”
This is a fine essay by James Poulos on the failure of “mass enlightenment” to occur via technology and the urge of the institutional elites to add more technology to fix the problem: On those premises, the internet arose. By...
colonizing Mars won’t be nearly as exciting as we think
Micah Meadowcroft is in top form with this essay at The New Atlantis about the letdown that colonizing Mars could be: Consider your place in our interplanetary future. Let us speculate. Suppose that SpaceX or some similar enterprise has succeeded,...
where Foucault and the Apostle Paul meet
This interview with Alan Jacobs is full of all the things I love to think about! The new book has an “Interlude,” in which you point to “other pilgrims, other paths,” and one of the figures is Dorothy Day, an icon...
“Nothing can take form except within limits.”
Wendell Berry summarizes many of our contemporary problems quite well in this excellent interview with Gracy Olmstead: Those problems could be summed up as the triumph of industrialism and industrial values over the lives of living creatures, and over the...