Launched under several aliases and in near-secrecy in 1974, Dia was the well-funded lovechild of a German art visionary named Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, a strikingly beautiful spiritual seeker and youngest scion of the Schlumberger oil fortune. De Menil’s largesse had created a kind of refuge from the speculative market in art then taking shape in New York, and a new canon of monumental, spiritually charged epics: a SoHo gallery floor buried, permanently, with black earth; a hollowed-out volcano, transformed into a science-fictional archaeo-astronomical laboratory for perceptual flight; a Promethean bed of nails poking dangerously into the desert sky, awaiting some gargantuan penitent. … But it took even less time to come apart. Amid falling share prices and rumors of an investigation of financial improprieties by New York’s attorney general, a group of concerned de Menils had launched a coup in 1984, replacing the original board with a respectable firewall of uptown lawyers and suits, putting much of Dia’s real estate and art holdings on the auction block and sequestering Philippa’s money in a trust. The stage was set for an epic confrontation between the suits and the dreamers… that never quite came to pass. The enigmatic Friedrich quit New York, disappeared into a wandering, art-mad exile; Philippa de Menil, the embattled heiress, had long since ceased to exist. In 1980, the woman she was had become a Sufi dervish named Fariha al-Jerrahi, and when the house of Dia fell, she moved on.

more from Alexander Keefe at Bidoun here.

In general outline at least the historical record is not in dispute. In 1946 Karl Popper addressed the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club on the subject Are There Philosophical Problems?. The subsequent discussion, chaired by Russell, is known to have been lively. At one point Wittgenstein, brandishing a poker, is said to have demanded of Popper that he offer an example of a moral rule: “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers”, Popper is said to have replied. At which point Wittgenstein, perhaps deciding it was a case of “thereof one must be silent”, stormed out. It has been suggested that the title and content of Popper’s paper were intended to provoke Wittgenstein who by this time is thought to have become sceptical of the existence of philosophical problems, and to believe that such “problems” were instead reducible to the misuse of language. Whether his scepticism was as well defined as many think is open to question. An alternative reading of Wittgenstein might be that he was developing a metaphilosophical perspective from which standard philosophical problems were drained of their force. Thus in the Blue and Brown Books he remarks that “philosophy really is purely descriptive”. Presumably, also, Popper thought that Wittgenstein, a former pupil of Russell and Moore, and by this time a Cambridge Don, had never come across a philosopher who took seriously the existence of philosophical problems. None of this is important of course. What is most notable about the “Poker incident” is its delicious status as an originator of that most wonderful thing: the philosophical feud.

more from Andy Walsh at Talking Philosophy here.

The miners take turns chopping the coalface. All around us a jury-rigged jumble of tree trunks is wedged against the tunnel’s ceiling, our only protection from being crushed by the five hundred meters of rock between here and the floor of the northern Afghan desert. My claustrophobia mounts with every chunk of coal that dings off my plastic helmet. One miner crouches in the access shaft and shovels coal into an iron railcar. My headlamp catches his face, and I see his teeth are flecked with black. His wiry muscles are straining with the effort, but he works fast. The afternoon shift divides a two-dollar bonus for every tonne of coal they haul. The crew is a half-hour into the afternoon shift, and they’re already filthy. Sweat mixed with coal dust trickles in rivulets down their bare backs. Superfine particles of coal swirl through the beams of their lamps. No one wears a mask; everyone breathes the black mist. The miners work down here, eight hours a day, for next to nothing—about a hundred dollars a month. And the statistics show they’ll spend ten percent of that income on petty bribes to the Afghan government. The whole of the Karkara coalmine runs on a budget of only four hundred thousand dollars a year, less than a sixth of what director Abdel Munir says he needs to hire a full complement of workers and to bring the mine up to international safety standards.

more from Elliott D. Woods at VQR here.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Are Our Writers As Lousy As Our Bankers?
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Bringing It All Back Home (to Shillong)
3. 3 Quarks Daily: In Praise of Yamato Spirit(s) : Passing By in Tokyo Part II
4. 3 Quarks Daily: Joothan: A Dalit’s Life
5. 3 Quarks Daily: New York’s Empire State of Mind: The Colonization of ‘Up’ Part I
6. 3 Quarks Daily: Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography
7. 3 Quarks Daily: Tokyo, Almost-Encounters, and “Passing By”
8. 3 Quarks Daily: What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather
9. Abbas Zaidi Writes, Innovates & Educates: Perspective Enrichment For A Better World
10. Accidental Blogger: The Leopard _ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
11. Amardeep Singh: The Demand’s of Honesty: On Amitava Kumar’s “Nobody Does the Right Thing”
12. AngelSpeak: If I Wasn’t Scared Before… Writing Memoir in Genzlinger’s Age
13. Belonging to a Different Macro-Quantum State of Mind: Time, talk to me!
14. Bibliographing: Let us keep each other’s secrets
15. Bookslut: In Search of Spiraling Time
16. Book Snob: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
17. Busy Being Born: If Facebook Didn’t Exist, It Would Be Necessary to Invent It
18. Butcheredswitch: Subway Writing
19. Chapati Mystery: I am a Bhains
20. Chapati Mystery: Oscar, Wow!
21. Chapati Mystery: Peccavistan
22. Chapati Mystery: The Stay-at-Home Man
23. Fame and Fortune: The Honesty of the Person
24. Fernham: Pearls and Power
25. Ground Views: We Regret To Inform You That Your Condolences Cannot Be Accepted At This Time
26. Guernica: The Un-Victim
27. Hundred Mountain: Thinking of Turtles
28. I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection: I Wonder How Long I Could Sit There
29. Jadaliyya: The Poetry of Revolt
30. Kuzhali Manickavel: Conversations–The Gee Oh
31. Kuzhali Manickavel: What Is Your Native
32. Literal Life: Freedom ~ Jonathan Franzen
33. M. A. Peel: Oh Frabjous Day: Woolverton’s FanFic Love for Alice
34. Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes: Adam Haslett, Lionel Shriver, and the Bygone Age of Order
35. Millicent and Carla Fran: On The Face That Launched a Thousand Clicks, Or What The Social Network Isn’t About
36. Millicent and Carla Fran: Why Don’t Women Submit?
37. Novel Readings: Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Leaving Brooklyn
38. Open Letters Monthly: Second Glance: The Daringly Sensible Majorie Hillis
39. Pank: This Modern Writer: 28, NO, MAKE THAT 30, ABSOLUTELY TRUE BLACK HISTORY FACTS ON THE OCCASION OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH (FORMERLY NEGRO HISTORY WEEK). 1 FOR EACH DAY, PLUS 1 IN THE CASE OF LEAP YEAR & 1 FOR GOOD LUCK
40. Plum: Hair Myth
41. Religious Left Law: Sufi Poetry
42. Sepia Mutiny: Letter to a Young Islamophobe
43. Stuck In A Book: Is there no balm in…
44. Tales from the Reading Room: The Precious Things
45. Tang Dynasty Times: A vase filled with perfumes (proust & the king of bhutan)
46. Tang Dynasty Times: Shipwrecked
47. The Awl: If You Have Only One Week in L.A.
48. The Millions: Beyond Harry, Oz, and Narnia: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians
49. The Millions: Brideshead Revisited
50. The Millions: Chasing the Whale: Banksy, Obsession, and the Sea
51. The Millions: Dispatch from the Borders-Land
52. The Millions: Every Day I Open A Book
53. The Millions: Her Story Next to His: Beloved and The Odyssey
54. The Millions: In Search of Iago
55. The Millions: In the Room: Against a Cultural Boycott of the Galle Literary Festival
56. The Millions: On Bad Reviews
57. The Millions: Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction
58. The Millions: The Sorry State of the Rejection Letter
59. The Morning News: A Song for Aretha
60. The Nervous Breakdown: Authors and Tattoos, Part I of II
61. The Nervous Breakdown: Authors and Tattoos, Part II of II
62. The Platform: which is to say: time bends like a weak knee, or so fresh and so clean, clean
63. This Space: The Shadow Cast by Writing
64. [TK] Reviews Blog: Aspiring Grownups: Editorial Assistants
65. Tolstoy Is My Cat: Flash Fiction: Snow
66. Vanity Fair Online: The Venerable, Vulnerable Taxi Drivers of New York
67. Vanity Fair Online: The Ground Zero Mosque’s Missing Muslims
68. Walter Kirn’s Permanent Morning: My Honest Impressions of Islam in the Biographical Order They Occured
69. Wellywood Woman: I feel the earth move under my feet
70. Writing Without Paper: Consider the Pomegranate

From the website of Credo:

Amazing. Inspiring. This is what people power can do.

When Republican Governor Scott Walker attacked state workers and threatened to call out the National Guard if they protested, it sparked a popular uprising in Wisconsin. And now the extreme proposal to take collective bargaining rights away from public employees is temporarily blocked as a result of mass protests.

Tens of thousands of people — including members of CREDO Action — have been out in the streets and in the Rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin. Students and citizens are protesting in solidarity with nurses, teachers and workers.

And the people are not alone. Instead of caving to the opposition, their elected representatives are fighting with them. In fact, Democratic state senators boldly left the state in order to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass Governor Walker's radical anti-worker, anti-union bill. As long as every Democratic state senator refuses to go to the capitol, a vote cannot be held.

More here.

Jonathan Kirshner in the Boston Review:

…the economy is poised to head down the same road that led to the recent collapse. This is the dispiriting conclusion of four recent books by particularly well-positioned observers. Nouriel Roubini can take credit for getting the crisis almost exactly right, long before it hit; this alone should make his Crisis Economics (coauthored with Stephen Mihm) required reading. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz reprises his role as one of the world’s foremost critics of “market fundamentalism” in Freefall. Richard Posner is closely associated with the free-market “Chicago School” of economics, and, as such, his bracing and intellectually admirable A Failure of Capitalism demands attention. (Posner explores similar themes in a recent academic work, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy.) Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and James Kwak, a businessman and consultant, wrote the best book of a fine bunch. Their 13 Bankers is a brilliant, important, and extremely unsettling work. Four big lessons emerge from these analyses.

Keynes was right and classical economics wrong. The economist John Maynard Keynes argued that the market has its limits. Most markets work well most of the time, but financial markets left alone are prone to dysfunction, and an economy stuck in a rut can stay in a rut for some time. Thus the necessity of the stimulus.

More here.

Frederick Bowie in Open Democracy:

Ongoing protests and actions in places from Madison, Wisconsin, to Central London have already appealed to the Egyptian experience, both explicitly, and symbolically. American public service workers last week brandished Egyptian flags to express their rejection of the state's attempts to deprive them of their union rights, while British activists have called for a day of action in March to “bring Tahrir Square to Hyde Park”. While the nature of every act of human revolt is specific and, at some level, untranslatable, the energy of empowerment which it releases is by its nature infectious, and transgressive. How long before here, in the West, our own governments' politically-motivated “austerity” programmes create the conditions in which a thousand Tahrirs can bloom? Looking back to recent events in France and Greece, we may feel that day is perhaps not so far away.

Noam Chomsky recently claimed that what western leaders are really afraid of is not an Islamist takeover in the Arab region, but the emergence of genuinely independent and democratic Arab states which will no longer kow-tow to Washington and do its bidding. That is surely part of the story. But I believe that what they are most afraid of is not just the emergence of democracy in the Arab world. However uncomfortable and embarrassing that may be, they know they can live with it. What they are most afraid of is that, having slept through the last 60 years of democracy, their own citizens/subjects may be about to wake up again to their own power: that, having seen what it is like when a people dictate to their government what it should do for them, rather than the reverse, we might start to take our own rights back, wholesale, rather than waiting for our rulers to grant us them in homeopathic doses – or fob us off with a placebo.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

From Guernica:

The day before the 2010 midterm elections, I sat down with Reza Aslan at his home in Los Angeles to discuss poetry, politics, and what comes next. In the most literal sense, “next” for Aslan is, in large part, centered around the publication of the groundbreaking anthology, Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. As controversial as it is revelatory, the anthology marks a new phase in the life of the scholar and artist who, perhaps unenviably, is one of the most recognizable commentators on the modern Middle East (a term that Aslan is quick to point out is a Western invention). Through his appearances on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, not to mention mainstream news outlets (after we spoke he was on his way to record an interview with Australia’s Insight news program), Aslan has become something of a celebrity. As I was reading Aslan’s books to prepare for this interview, I was stopped no less than five times by people who can only be described as fans. Most of these people had read his books, but all knew him from television. As we spoke, the subject of social media came up repeatedly, both in terms of the implications it’s had on his own career and, on a deeper level, how notions of borders and identity are shifting as the demarcations between local and global are increasingly blurred. I wondered what possibilities and challenges these issues offered Aslan in his new role as an anthologist.

Aslan describes Tablet and Pen as a “pivot” in his career’s mission to “build bridges between peoples of the West and the Middle East,” and while that is true, it’s equally important to note that the book can also be seen as an entirely new way of envisioning the anthology form. As opposed to the usual compendium of poems and stories whose sheer critical mass is meant to signify the historical importance of the anthology’s subject, Aslan has created a book that functions more like a novel.

More here.

Jason Wilson in The Smart Set:

I love a good argument. I particularly love a good argument about drinks. And I especially love a good drinks argument in which manifestos are published. This is why — whether we're talking about wine, spirits or beer — it's endlessly amusing to bring up the topic of alcohol content.

In wine, there are supporters of high-alcohol fruit bombs versus sommeliers who refuse to put any wine over 14 percent on their lists. In spirits, it's the opposite: Many craft bartenders thumb their noses at whiskey that falls below 100 proof. And in beer, there's the perennial issue of the session beer.
Session beers are low-alcohol, high-flavor, easy-drinking, reasonably priced beers that one might drink all night long and still be able to walk home without doing something stupid. Essentially, a session beer is the opposite of the 8 to 12 percent hop/sour/funk monsters that so many beer geeks love.

The idea of finding a really good session beer occurred to me when I was at my local bar, a place with two dozen craft beers on tap. I noticed that more than half the bar was drinking bottles of Miller Lite (4.17 percent alcohol by volume) or Bud Light (4.2 percent). This, while right at their disposal was everything from Maudite (8 percent) to Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA (9 percent) to Scaldis Bush de Noel (12 percent) to even my own current session beer, Victory Prima Pils (5.3 percent).

I asked one of the guys — a tough-looking dude with a chinstrap beard and lots of tattoos — why he wasn't drinking any of the great beers on tap. He glared at me. “I'm gonna drink for, like, the next five hours. Do you want to see what happens when I drink more than one of those?”

More here.

This article is posted in honor of Black History Month:

From Smithsonian:

For much of their history, Americans dealt with racial differences by drawing a strict line between white people and black people. But Daniel J. Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University, notes that even while racial categories were rigidly defined, they were also flexibly understood—and the color line was more porous than it might seem. His new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, traces the experience of three families—the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls—beginning in the 17th century. Smithsonian magazine's T.A. Frail spoke with Sharfstein about his new book:

People might assume that those who crossed the line from black to white had to cover their tracks pretty thoroughly, which would certainly complicate any research into their backgrounds. But does that assumption hold?

That’s the typical account of passing for white—that it involved wholesale masquerade. But what I found was, plenty of people became recognized as white in areas where their families were well known and had lived for generations, and many could cross the line even when they looked different. Many Southern communities accepted individuals even when they knew those individuals were racially ambiguous—and that happened even while those communities supported slavery, segregation and very hard-line definitions of race.

More here.

Mark Blyth over at Triple Crisis:

By the time the G20 met in Paris last weekend only the degree of fiscal rectitude was up for grabs, Obama having joined the consolidators. And as for the lofty goals of INET [Institute for New Economic Thinking], it is significant that their next meeting will be held at the Bretton Woods hotel where the post-war Keynesian order was assembled. These new economic thinkers seem to be searching for ‘Paradigms lost.’

All of which makes me wonder about the conditions under which the economic ideas that, as Keynes put it, “dominate the economic thought, both practical and theoretical, of the governing and academic classes of this generation” change? As I argue in a new piece for the journal Governance, if one views the problem of paradigm shift as one where some series of events act as anomaly generators that undermine the theory, leading to its eventual and ultimate collapse and replacement, then the 2008 crisis was as close to a perfect natural experiment as you can get. To list some of the howlers: prices were not right in any sense, liquidity turned out to be a social property after all, VaR and associated techniques of risk management proved to be worse than useless, and the whole experiment cost (so far) around $2-3 trillion dollars.

You might then think that given such large losses and red faces we really should now be living in a post-neoclassical world. Yet we are not. Here are two reasons why this is the case: one that I don’t buy and one that I do buy.

“There is (still) no Alternative” – There is No New Paradigm.

This is a very odd but powerful form of argument. Odd, when you consider that this blog, INET, and hundreds of other sources are actively building one. Powerful, in that by saying that ‘unless you replace one complete integrated mathematically perfect theory with another one you should stick with the one you have got.’

I have always been suspicious of this form of argument for three reasons. First, part of the pathology of the old paradigm was precisely its perfectly integrated general form, which made it quite useless for acting in the world. Any new paradigm should be robust to the world, which means partial and revisable in the light of experience. Economists tend not to like that idea.

The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in a famous story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.3 Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

more from Freeman Dyson at the NYRB here.

The ability to predict what someone will do in the future would be a seriously handy superpower. And it’s one that companies like Netflix and Amazon, by crunching the massive trails of data most of us leave behind these days, have come pretty close to acquiring. Surely, though, there is something more ambitious to be done with our dazzling modern technology than trying to guess what kind of microwave someone’s going to want next. Something like preventing murders. It’s a seductive notion, that we could know who will and who won’t commit a crime in the future. And while it may call to mind the science-fiction world of “Minority Report,” making judgments about people’s potential to be dangerous is in fact an essential — and routine — part of how the American justice system works. It is what parole boards do, and what sentencing hearings are for. The consequences of getting such high-stakes decisions wrong can be devastating, as was made tragically plain last Christmas when police say a fellow officer from Woburn was shot and killed by 57-year-old Domenic Cinelli, a career criminal who had been paroled in 2008 while serving three concurrent life sentences for armed robbery. What if we had a better method for reliably identifying threats like Cinelli?

more from Leon Neyfakh at The Boston Globe here.

This article is posted in honor of Black History Month:

From Biography.com:

The Montgomery, Alabama city code required that all public transportation be segregated and that bus drivers had the “powers of a police officer of the city while in actual charge of any bus for the purposes of carrying out the provisions” of the code. While operating a bus, drivers were required to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and black passengers by assigning seats. This was accomplished with a line roughly in the middle of the bus separating white passengers in the front of the bus and African-American passengers in the back. When an African-American passenger boarded the bus, they had to get on at the front to pay their fare and then get off and re-board the bus at the back door. When the seats in the front of the bus filled up and more white passengers got on, the bus driver would move back the sign separating black and white passengers and, if necessary, ask black passengers give up their seat.

On December 1, 1955, after a long day at work at the Montgomery Fair department store, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for home. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for “colored” passengers. Though the city's bus ordinance did give drivers the authority to assign seats, it didn't specifically give them the authority to demand a passenger to give up a seat to anyone (regardless of color). However, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the custom of requiring black passengers to give up their seats to white passengers, when no other seats were available. If the black passenger protested, the bus driver had the authority to refuse service and could call the police to have them removed. As the bus Rosa was riding continued on its route, it began to fill with white passengers. Eventually, the bus was full and the driver noticed that several white passengers were standing in the aisle. He stopped the bus and moved the sign separating the two sections back one row and asked four black passengers to give up their seats. Three complied, but Rosa refused and remained seated. The driver demanded, “Why don't you stand up?” to which Rosa replied, “I don't think I should have to stand up.” The driver called the police and had her arrested. Later, she recalled that her refusal wasn't because she was physically tired, but that she was tired of giving in. The police arrested Rosa at the scene and charged her with violation of Chapter 6, section 11 of the Montgomery City code. She was taken to police headquarters where later that night she was released on bail. On December 8, Rosa faced trial and in a 30 minute hearing was found guilty of violating a local ordinance. She was fined $10, plus a $4 court fee.

More here.

The Tao Te Ching
of Lao Tzu
Verse 1.

Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
but none of them are absolute
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately sees the surface,
The core and the surface
are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder to wonder
Existence opens.

version by Witter Bynner
from The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu, 1944

From Scientific American:

Black holes, as their name suggests, are dark. Perfectly dark. A black hole's gravity is so intense that beyond a certain boundary in its vicinity, known as the event horizon, nothing can escape. Not a rocket with its boosters on full blast nor a photon of light. Nothing. Despite the fact that astronomers cannot peer at what goes on inside the event horizon, a black hole's gravitational effects on its neighborhood allow for a number of indirect observations. Swirls of infalling gas heat up and give off radiation to illuminate a black hole's vicinity, and the orbits of stars around a black hole allow astronomers to estimate its mass. Now researchers have proposed a new optical technique to observe and study black holes by measuring the imprint they should leave on the light that passes near an event horizon.

A black hole's gravitational pull is so strong that it warps the spacetime around it. And if a black hole rotates, as would be the case for a hole that forms from the collapse of a spinning star, it drags spacetime along with it, a phenomenon known as frame dragging. (Less massive bodies also cause frame dragging on a smaller scale; NASA's Gravity Probe B launched in 2004 to measure the frame-dragging effects of Earth's rotation with sensitive gyroscopes.) According to a new analysis, the frame dragging of a black hole should put a detectable twist on nearby photons by imparting a trait known as orbital angular momentum. A light beam with orbital angular momentum looks a bit like a helix or coil when its component waves are mapped out. Whether any point along the beam is a wave peak, a trough or something in between depends on where that point lies with respect to the helix's central axis.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

His name was L. Ron Hubbard. This year, 2011, happens to be the 100th anniversary of his birth (on March 13, to be exact). By the mid-1950s, Hubbard was a legend. He'd written in every field and form imaginable. The pulps were his bread and butter. He churned out stories and novels. He wrote adventures and mysteries and thrillers and sci-fi. In 1934 he published, among other things, a mystery story called “Calling Squad Cars!”; a sea adventure featuring black pearls called “Pearl Pirate”; a Western called “Maybe Because—!”; an adventure story called “Yellow Loot” that includes a race along China's Great Wall; a detective story called “The Carnival of Death,” in which a U.S. Treasury agent solves murders at a carnival; and “Tooby,” a musical story about a tuba.

In 1940, Hubbard really seemed to hit his stride. He published a story called “Fear” in Unknown, one of the pulp magazines of the time. In the story, a professor publishes a paper debunking myths about the existence of devils and demons and is then hounded by said devils and demons. Ray Bradbury liked “Fear” a lot, calling it “a great scare.” Hubbard also wrote a sci-fi story called “Final Blackout.” It's the story of a lieutenant who comes to rule England after years of atomic warfare. Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land) famously said the story was, “as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written.”

More here.

David E. Nye in American Scientist:

Whether it’s intended to be so or not, the title of Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants is a provocation to most historians of technology, who would reply almost unanimously that technology has no wants or desires. Each tool or machine has latent uses, but each is only an inert object until human beings decide whether and how to use it. In contrast, Kelly talks about technology as a composite whole that emerged before human beings existed and that facilitated their rapid domination of the planet. For him, technology has intentions, and it is radically accelerating evolution.

Kelly has been thinking about technology for most of his life, first as a backpacker wandering the Third World, later as one of the pioneers of what became the Internet, and finally as one of the founders and editors of Wired magazine. He overcame his early suspicion of Western technology largely as a result of his encounter with interactive computer technologies. He was one of several in the counterculture to move from working on the Whole Earth Catalog to celebrating the Internet as a new online facilitator of grassroots movements.

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us” and includes “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” He coins the term because he wishes to emphasize the idea of technology as an overarching entity that constitutes the equivalent of an evolving “seventh kingdom of life,” one that “predated our humanness.”

More here.