Category: Technology
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...
why are we still using faxes in the 21st century, anyway?
Ilana Yurkiewicz looks at the ugly world of health records and how one of her patients kept getting harmed by the lack of information sharing: While most hospitals in the United States today use electronic health records, they remain disparate,...
“Nothing that is given is valued.”
You know how when someone is rubbing your back because it’s sore and they find the exact spot that hurts and press on it and you saw “YEOW!” because it hurts but also because they found it? That’s what I felt like reading...
The glory of reading
Micah Meadowcroft sounds a refrain that we can’t hear often enough: The glory of reading is its capacity to make us more ourselves, as we learn with minimal mediation how to pay attention and integrate within our own minds the...
the devil in the details
Jeffrey Bilbro has an excellent essay ruminating on the question of GMOs in the New Jerusalem, inspired by Abigail Murrish’s thoughts at Christianity Today on the same. Here’s Murrish: if the New Jerusalem will have as-yet-unseen cultural diversity—the best of what...
the temptations of social media
All of us wrestle with how to use social media and Andrew Peterson has a thought-provoking post up about how and why he’s been using it less and less — but also why that’s not an easy decision: Okay, so...
limits appropriate to the human condition
It seems that a lot of criticism of technology criticism goes along the lines of “it’s not the technology, it’s user error” — and along with this critique is often the very Whiggish idea that if we just come up...
“the patient in the hospital bed is just the icon”
Abraham Verghese has a moving and pointed reflection about the ubiquity of technology in the hospital: When students arrive on the wards full time, white coats packed with the aforementioned instruments, measuring tape, tuning fork, flashlight and Snellen eye chart,...