The Wonderful Power of Writing
In addition to being a marketable skill on LinkedIn, writing is — or was — an awe-inspiring technology, representing a power to make language go beyond one person’s limits in terms of time, space...
Category: art
Absence of Mind: Book Review
Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. If you’re reading Robinson’s essays, you probably have already read her novels. You may well approach the essays as I did,...
Heartfield and Photography
The celebrated German photomontage artist John Heartfield (né Helmut Herzfeld, 1891-1968), had an astonishing gift for finding specific photographs and reconfiguring them as news in a world of his invention — a world in...
What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics: Book Review
Adam Becker, What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, London: John Murray, 2018. This book is, at heart, a history of one literally earth-shaking event in the history of...
Gesture and Speech
This book makes human evolution look more exciting and provocative than I would have thought possible. In particular, it explains why, when we know that many, probably most plants and animals have evolved to...
Needing a Translator
We’d been skyping for months, both really enjoying it, I think — my husband kept noticing how much laughter was coming from the room where the really big computer lives. I was translating Lambert’s...