Word: abouts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Talk about your sensitive poets. If Emerson found such modest machinery as corn grinders dehumanizing, how would he handle the end of this century? Today we are more than ever slaves of technology, tethered to computers and cell phones and beepers. Meanwhile, we have to cope with unprecedented change. Things...
For example, the code of the Mesopotamian city of Eshnunna in the early second millennium B.C., developed a century before the more famous code of Hammurabi, left no doubt what would happen if you punched a man in the face: a fine of 10 shekels of silver (a bargain compared...
This aura of inexorability has led some people to wax poetic about cosmic purpose. The Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing at midcentury, long before the Internet, nonetheless discerned a "thinking envelope of the earth" that he dubbed the "noosphere." This was the divinely ordained outcome of the two...
Now, nearly a half-century after Teilhard's death, we have cause to be less sanguine about this noosphere business. Viewing the noosphere up close and personal--from the inside--we can see that its potential for good and evil is about equal. The Internet can unite people across distance...
It all happened so fast. One minute Madama Butterfly was on the Gramophone, Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills was on the reading table, the pretty Gibson Girl you had seen in a magazine was on your mind. You wondered if you wanted to see Maude Adams...