Tag Archives: technology

On Black Friday, Stay Focused

In “Ceremony,” Leslie Marmon Silko warns what can happen if we let commercialization blind us to our real gifts. It’s a good lesson for Black Friday.

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The Stories We Tell Our Robots

My sons have a podcast–“The Stories We Tell Our Robots”–which links literature with such developments as bitcoin, chatbots, airline pricing, and the like. Their rating system ranges from utopia to apocalypse.

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Using Fantasy to Take Back Time

Fantasy appeals to us as we chafe against machine-imposed reality, including machine-imposed time.

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Would Tolstoy Today Mention Facebook?

A recent article in The Huffington Post complaining about a significant omission in contemporary novels reminded me of a similar complaint that Jane Austen makes about novels of her own time period. Read the complaint below and then, if you know Jane Austen’s works, see if you can guess which passage I’m thinking of. Asking […]

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Learning to Live with E-Readers

Gustave Dore, Don Quixote  An e-reader has entered our family. Here’s how it happened. My son Toby is studying for his English Ph.D preliminaries and wanted to spend a month reading 19th century British works in the family Maine cottage. He was accompanied by his girlfriend Candice, who is writing qualifying essays for her dissertation. […]

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