Digital love song: Swipe the One You’re With Photoshopping the Brain ‘The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is perfect, the engineer is nobody. Every new step in improving the engine restricts one more act of the engineer,—unteaches him.’ —Ralph Waldo Emerson This week I began upgrading my…
Category: Politics
Rewriting the Covid Narrative
Rewriting the Covid Narrative by Nowick Gray This month marks the release of two new books offering fresh takes on the whole traumatic Covid catastrophe. In subverting the dominant narrative, both books enlist the force of creative truth-telling and demonstrate the undeniable power of the human heart. Both also supply…
Narrative Sabotage
Narrative Sabotage by Nowick Gray It seemed, for a moment there, as though we might have reason to celebrate. The End of Mandates! was announced by government officials everywhere, even as the medical freedom movement was criminalized and hauled off in chains, and draconian legislation was being embedded in bureaucratic…
Rome vs. the Barbarians, Part 2
In Part 1 of Rome vs. the Barbarians, I introduce Thomas Mann’s little-known political essays from World War I Germany (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man), painting the perennial battle not so much between West and East, or democracy and autocracy, but between progress and tradition, the future and the past,…