book excerpt

Let’s say you want to go on a walking tour of San Francisco at its warmest and most energetic. You want to see the port town after the rush for gold swelled the foggy backwater into the…

One put it simply: “I think we’re all getting a little tired of being at the mercy of social media algorithms and want to take control of our content and livelihoods.”There’s someone who…

In December 2021, megawatt American entertainer Ariana Grande posted a photo of herself wearing dark winged eyeliner, a foundation lighter than her skin tone, and a bright red lip often…

When we drive to Pennsylvania in the summers, with my daughters locked in to their screens for the miles and miles of cornfields and blasted-out hillsides, we drive there to visit the…

Gus Dupin, walking along the stillness of Stony Lake in the gathering night, recognized the sleek motorboat approaching his dock. A girl in a bright yellow sundress jumped off and sprinted…

In 1939, the Great Depression still raging, the president of Zenith Radio Corporation, Commander Eugene F. McDonald Jr., commissioned the first baby monitor, designed by the famous American…

When hormonal contraceptive pills were first introduced to the public in 1960, they were initially packaged in a bottle, like other drugs. A few years later, Ortho-Novum was the first to…

He began to put together an excavation team. For this hazardous mission, he chose the gunner, John Bulkeley, though he considered him to be an argumentative sailor, a so-called sea lawyer…

But it’s not only bats and aliens—fictional or optimistically imagined—who brandish subjective experiences we cannot understand. Nagel cites his own inability to understand “the subjective…

Given these real and growing risks to human flourishing, there is—just barely—time to be wiser. Looking at this future is like “looking down that railroad track and seeing that little…