You think people know what you are thinking. You think that you are rational. You even think that life is fair. Actually, you are not that smart.
posted by ejoey on Jul 27, 2010 - 66 comments

Blogs are bad, essays good. Yet another priesthood is taking defensive action, this time essayists. In this piece, the author argues, without much thought or precision, that the throughtful, precise essay is much, much better than those dirty blogs. With apologies to Bill Maher, NEW RULE: If you think Matt Drudge is a blogger and cite him as such, you've already lost the argument.
posted by baltimore on May 15, 2005 - 20 comments

From Between Being and Becoming by Ilya Prigogine, The Future Won’t Look Like the Present by Stephen Hawking to The Fate of the Religious Imagination by Czeslaw Milosz, to mention but a few, finds New Perspectives Quarterly: The Scientific Imagination presenting an overflowing cornucopia of food for thought. And that's just this issue--Check out the archives, too. Essays--by an impressive cohort of authors--abound on a myriad of topics.
posted by y2karl on Nov 28, 2004 - 12 comments

Paul Ford's Ftrain has a great piece on Micrsoft Word, writing, and the web. His stream-of-consciousness essay has hilarious nuggets like the "computer science axiom 'all software expands until it can send mail.'" There's a couple illustrations worth noting: the first looks like Word with all the tool bar icons enabled, and the other is Word's paperclip assistant interfering with an especially private moment. Great stuff.
posted by mathowie on Feb 8, 2000 - 1 comment