Humanity’s greatest invention
Reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species’s past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us “to listen to the dead with our eyes.”
But how, in such a short time, did the human species evolve this unique skill, one that requires the [...]
THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL
The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox
By John Freeman
On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven  google alerts on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants [...]
THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD
By Padgett Powell
Does The Interrogative Mood sound like a C.I.A. agent’s whimsical memoir, an epistemological study, a grammar guide, a dating primer or a book that playfully and provocatively asks so many questions - funny, sad, informative, rhetorical, prurient, maudlin, political and absurd questions - that under its spell you’ll more clearly envision [...]
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