Tag: technology
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The Tweets of the Christ
I’ve got a new little piece at Religion Dispatches this morning about last Friday’s Twitter passion play hosted by Trinity Church, that ancient place located at the top of Wall Street. “If you look in the scripture,” explains Linda Hanick, Trinity’s V.P. of communications and marketing, “the last words of Jesus are almost written in…
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Twitter Ontology
You know how people nowadays, when traveling especially, need to take a picture of everything just to be sure they’ve experienced it? Maybe they actually look at all those pictures. Or some of them. But isn’t the driving force much more that sneaking feeling at the moment of capture, a dizziness with experience that makes…
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The Multiverse Problem
I’ve got a new article out in Seed about how religious physicists, in particular, are thinking their way around the theological problems posed by multiverse theory. It’s good, mind-bending stuff. Scientists now recognize that if space were expanding at a slightly different speed, or if the strong nuclear force were just a little off, our…
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The Rubber Band Wallet
A friend recently suggested that I write a blog post about my wallet. Seemed like a good idea to me. When you look around at the literature on the internet about how to improve blog traffic, one of the suggestions that often comes up is to teach something that readers can use. And since The…
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The Future of Publishing Round-up
This month I left my part-time job at The New York Times. Actually, now that I’m done, I can forget about Times style conventions and write “the New York Times” or even “the New York Times”! Very satisfying. Anyway. It was a fine place to work (particularly thanks to the cafeteria) but after a year,…
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Surfing the Satellite
The clever folks over at The Smart Set have just posted my essay on watching TV in Jordan, “Surfing the Satellite”: What if more Americans got this madness on their sets, rather than the endless rolling plains of midwestern accents (dotted by the occasional Telemundo) on spin-off networks of spin-off networks? There isn’t much that…
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Questions for Mark Lilla
The Social Science Research Council has just posted on its website an interview I did with Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia and, most recently, author of The Stillborn God. We had a most pleasant conversation. In particular, I asked about his experience of the discussion about his book on the SSRC’s blog, The…
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Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Last night, Dr. Atomic closed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and I saw it from standing room. I have already written about a slow opera with big hopes, Philip Glass’s Satyagraha—this is another. What is it about these new operas, which have to turn every historical event into a funeral march? In John Adams’s presentation…
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The Uses of Free Culture
Tonight I had the pleasure to attend one of Fred Benenson’s Creative Commons salons at the office of my old employer in the West Village. It was a treat of ingenuity, pizza, and beer, somehow paid for by “free culture.” The idea we’re supposed to take home with us is that great things can be…
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A Clipping Service
Maybe you’ve noticed I’ve been playing around with The Row Boat’s Text Ticker the last few days. This little feature, which has been hiding on the sidebar for a few months now, is part of my way of finding the fine line that every blog strives for between self-indulgence and providing an honest service. In…