During a recent colloquium I attended, Alisa Carse warned that biomedical technologies increasingly offer opportunities to ignore human vulnerability. After I told Vladimir de Thézier about her talk, he asked me to try to identify her as either a left-wing bioconservative or a technoprogressive. Since readers may be unfamiliar with these terms, I will offer [...]
Lawrence Lessig appeared at the top floor of the National Press Club building in Washington on Thursday to launch the first phase of Change Congress. I listened directly in front of him in the front row, and I was pleased to see all of the tech geeks who showed up for his talk, because they [...]
A lot of people want to be both correct and powerful. Rational selfhood and sovereign statehood comprise, together, a highly seductive intellectual and political objective. This most perfect union, joining veracity to supremacy, is the most alluring of all fantasies: a self whose single voice (for a self can, it is supposed, only have one) [...]
I woke up late this morning and glanced at the dozens of entries on Dale Carrico’s blog I have been too busy to read. I then discovered this gem from last month, in which Dale pondered a “neuroethical analogue to the eugenics movement”, which he inventively calls, “euneurics”.
My sister Mary Elizabeth suggested I should check out the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall. I finally made it out there today, and what I found is one of the most fantastic exhibits I have ever witnessed.
One of the most memorable books I ever laid my hands on was Bruce Sterling’s 02005 Shaping Things. It is both a history of created objects and a vision for what they could become. Reading Shaping Things is like waking up in a world where ecological gurus, design students, and electronics engineers banged heads one [...]
India, China, and the United States are players in a non-zero-sum economic game — or so hope Mona Sutphen and Nina Hachigian of the Center for American Progress.
This video would have been so much more compelling without the music track and so much B roll. Come on guys: These are smart, articulate women who don’t [...]
I was thinking in generalities today about Eastern Europe and the questions posed by economic development in the region (though I’ve never actually been there). There are economic, political, social, and cultural changes occurring in Eastern European states, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, and Turkey, as they relate to Western Europe and the European Union.