The Kowloon Diaries

The lost art of reading

An article from the LA Times in which the author is moaning about not being able to read with the distractions of technology. It gets more interesting when he talks about reading as an act of engagement with the world and other people. Reading is so often described as an escape, but it’s the opposite. He writes: ‘Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being.’

What is Your Dangerous Idea? Edited by John Brockman

I've been dipping in and out of this collection of essays written by Today's Leading Thinkers who are, apparently, people like Daniel C Dennett, Susan Blackmore and Stephen Pinker. It's not bad, but I've heard most of these arguments before. The authors agonise over stuff like the non-existence of the soul, human inequality, eugenics, free will, consciousness, and the general pointlessnes of the universe. Actually it was quite depressing. Today's Leading Thinkers seem to do a lot of worrying and don't have a lot of answers.