I don’t need to go on about the benefits of reading, but here’s a brief paean: it has dramatically improved my quality of life. I’m less anxious. My thoughts feel cleaner. Thinking itself is more pleasurable. Pain is less mysterious. My brain is just better. Books are a privileged medium. We’re grammatical beings. We talk to ourselves in sentences.
blue bits. red rocks.
In reading as in other things I have always striven to practice obedience. There is nothing more favorable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
Of course, unless you’re part of the 1%, the odds that you have actual receipts for any beers bought at Madison Square Garden this postseason are exceedingly small. And that’s what has me so bummed out today, that the vision I can’t get out of my head isn’t some elderly Knicks diehard from Spanish Harlem finally enjoying his moment but Jimmy Fallow waving his arms, trying to get the camera to fall on him, because apparently being on TV every night for more than a decade just isn’t enough attention. Attending a Knicks home game against the Charlotte Hornets in February is absurdly expensive for the average family, and attending a playoff game anywhere, forget about it. Going to an NFL, NBA, or MLB game has long been expensive, but for regular fans and families, doing so a couple times a season was at least somewhat attainable. I could quote a thousand different statistics - a beer and a hotdog at So-Fi stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, now go for $27 - but I don’t really have to. Everyone knows that live sports are too expensive for regular people now.
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The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.
Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put some brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone.
There’s a popular sermon illustration that likens our penchant for decorating our churches and ourselves with crosses to venerating the electric chair. But there’s something even worse about the cross. It’s more than just a tool for dispatching criminals (or the criminally disapproved). Electrocutions are awful, but at least they take place inside. The whole point of pinning someone up in public like an insect on a card was to render them a specimen: an example of what power can and will happily do to those it does not favor, and an invitation to look on with fascination, disgust, and even relief at being the one who remains on the ground, safely within the bounds of the recognizably human. The physical undoing of crucifixion, so clearly and cleverly devised to disfigure and defile its victims in their public agony is, well, diabolically effective at eliciting more horror and revulsion than sympathy in those unfortunate enough to witness it. It’s not only that the cross kills, and kills brutally. It’s that all at once, with its horizontal and vertical planks, the cross divides and isolates its victim from the fellowship of those who put him there and the God who fails to put a stop to this, who sits silently and apparently disinterested above.
The cross is not and cannot be loved.
More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation
The iPad’s much-lauded “ease of use” was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation.