Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: James Marriott’s “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” (2026)
“the beginning of the slow replacement of reality by screen time (65). “The screen tends towards chaos” (71). “The aim of much ‘content’ is not to educate viewers or to inform them. It is not even really to amuse them. The highest aspiration of many of the most successful masters of the medium is simply… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Jill Lepore’s “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” (2026)
“farms of servers, clouds of data, AI ecosystems—the allusions are always to the natural world that the machinery is destroying” (5). “Within the Artificial State, nearly every element of public and democratic life—civil society, representative government, an informed citizenry, equality of rights, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: George Newman’s “How Great Ideas Happen” (2026)
“From this point forward, Mondrian iterates endlessly on this same motif. During the second half of his career, his paintings have an almost obsessive quality as he narrows in and refines. It’s as if he is trying to understand the very limits of what this combination of elements can produce and unearth all that he… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Leonard Koren’s “Lost in Thought” (2026)
“Thinking, I thought, was at the core of the problem. What problem? All problems” (54). “The book’s premise was that we live in two worlds: an actual physical world and an intangible, invisible world of thought. These two worlds are constantly interacting with one another: Thoughts color and influence the way we perceive and react… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Geoff Dyer’s “The Ongoing Moment” (2005)
“[Photographer] Dorothea Lange also believed that ‘to know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting.’ As far as she was concerned it was fine for a photographer to work ‘completely without plan’ and just photograph ‘that to which he instinctively responds’. Taking Lange… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence” (2014)
“It opened with that northern brass band music which sounds like it marched to its own funeral more than a century ago, music whose every note is a lamentation for its having become extinct” (76). “Except extinction no longer means ‘no longer in existence’. Plenty of extinct things are still around. Brass bands, for example:… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Sebastian Mallaby’s “The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence” (2026)
“The result confirmed the central contention in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Human intuition was not so magical after all. A machine could reproduce it with the trick of mapping one thing onto another” (147). “AI experts had long recognized that tasks that humans perform instantly and unthinkingly, such as recognizing an image, are hard to program,… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: John Berger’s “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos” (2026)
“The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering” (13). “Most workers in the world carry the same physical stigma: a sign of… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: W.G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” (1995)
“I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert,… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dave Eggers’ “Contrapposto: A Novel” (2026)
“Rembrandt lived three hundred years ago and knew far more than we do now. How is that? Why is that? Why have we gotten less skilled, less competent, less knowledgeable, less adept and versatile? How can that be?” (168). “You have been mistaught! You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is… Continue reading
