The return of the watch -- in the form of Apple Watch -- will bring us a far more entrenched "management" than those Rolexes ever did. If the history of clocks and watches is a history of the gradually tightening ordering of our lives, then the Apple Watch could be that history's ultimate consummation.
09/20/2014 10:16 EDT
Recently, I spent a glum and rainy afternoon scrolling through a couple dozen YouTube testimonials from bullied and traumatized youths. I found that the narrative tradition these videos most closely resemble is not a literary one at all -- it's the Catholic tradition of confession.
07/28/2014 01:43 EDT
I believe the most crucial thing we need to teach digital natives is how to be alone. Every communication technology -- from papyrus to the printing press to Pinterest -- brought us great gifts; they also led us away from earlier frames of mind. And, in the case of the Internet and smartphones, that may leave us with impoverished interior lives.
07/23/2014 12:29 EDT