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Category: Posts

  • Different Sorts of Skepticism

    Among Victorians, apparently, it was a kind of minor sport to Name That Hellenic Philosophical Movement. Your friend Charles the glutton would of course be the epicurean, pious William the stoic, and your father, deep down, a cynic. And so on. Since, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, all philosophy is really just footnotes on…

  • Design Worth Defending

    Since 9/11, it has been a national fad to link just about every agenda to security and the war on terror. The war in Iraq itself is only the worst example. This is an old tradition; Cold War strategy was once a big part of the justification for massive investment in the Interstate highway system…

  • At the Movies

    Just up on Religion Dispatches is my article on The Love Guru, which is one of the most pointless films I’ve ever seen. There was wonderful thing about it, though: it was in seeing The Love Guru that I saw—witnessed, experienced—the trailer for Wall-E, which, after a week of fabulous anticipation, I finally got to…

  • Back on the Safety Net

    Here’s to healthcare—yesterday, apparently, marks the beginning of my health insurance coverage through the Freelancers’ Union, a fine internet-based organization that helps out the growing ranks of independent workers. It comes six months, just about to the day, from when my graduate school insurance cut off and I joined the 48 million uninsured Americans. My…

  • All the Web a Wiki

    For a person who does lots of absorbing and creating on the internet, a big new thing can feel incredibly daunting. The specter of Being Behind always lurks as a possibility in the nightmare of waking up to discover that the internet has moved on and left you behind like an old Web 1.0 site.…

  • The Voyage of the Beagle

    I wrote what follows at the beginning of the year, upon first arriving in New York. I sent it in to a contest, and it didn’t win, so I thought it might be fair game to share here. It is called, “The Voyage of the Beagle.” I’m actually not sure if this is the final…

  • An Exercise in Becoming

    For the last three posts I have been exploring the process of becoming. An outgrowth of that, as far as the site goes, has been a rather radical transformation. Rather than being hosted at Small’s Clone Industries, where The Row Boat has lived since it began in 2005, it now lives at www.therowboat.com, a home…

  • Becoming a Professional

    Previously, in “Becoming a Person,” I wrote, with no great originality: Incidentally, coherent personhood has been the assumption behind rational government (all but Louis XIV’s Le etat, c’est moi), especially republican democracy. Voting, opinion polls, representation, and constitutions all depend on the assumption that citizens are coherent persons. The same goes, of course, for all…

  • Becoming a Person

    The New York Times week in review, blessedly (and quoting the fabulous journal The New Atlantis), quotes William James on attention this week. The point, naturally, is yet another condemnation of our relentlessly multitasking, over-busy mental society. But there is so much more in this pregnant piece: To James, steady attention was thus the default…

  • Becoming a Generation

    My generation continues to … flounder. Our biggest news lately was the Iowa caucus, when Barack Obama made a surprising showing, which the exit polls attributed to the youth vote—students had come back early to their campuses to caucus. The next day, as the whole show moved to New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton started making her…