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Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something [...]

iD: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century by Susan Greenfield review | Non-fiction book reviews - Times Online
Lady Greenfield posits three types of identity. Those who are “Someone” locate themselves in relation to others, changing and responding as they gain experience. Those who are “Anyone” are characterised by action, not reflection, and have [...]

Smile and kiss your right to privacy goodbye (according to David Byrne)
Technorati Tags: byrne, copyright, photography

Oliver Burkeman: This column will change your life | Lifeandhealth | Life and Health
…the psychologist Neal Roese explains in his book, If Only, “If you decide to do something and it turns out badly, research shows that it probably won’t haunt you down the road. You’ll reframe the failure and move on. But [...]

The Happiness Project: This Saturday: a happiness quotation from Schopenhauer.
“To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something [...]

I first heard mention of Charles Taylor via Charles Guignon’s book in the Thinking in Action series - ‘On Being Authentic‘.
And then read this article in The Guardian:
Is that all there is? | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books
Secularism, he charges, has left us leading hollow, atomised lives, devoid of what he (to my mind [...]

Poor old Martin Amis - he takes a real beating in this Guardian article written by the impressive Ronan Bennett.
Shame on us | News | Guardian Unlimited Books
Interesting in the context of the earlier post in which Hitchens defends Amis against the attacks of the even more recalcitrant Mark Steyn.
Amis has been sloppy - Bennett’s [...]

Peter Wollen notes,
“Visual display is the other side of the spectacle, the side of production rather than consumption or reception.
Guy Debord, the theorist of spectacle, noted how, in modern times, an excess of display has the effect of concealing the truth of the society that produces it, providing the viewer with an unending stream of [...]

I stumbled across this article on the meaning of life by Richard Taylor.
I will write a comment tomorrow.