1. “Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City”
“Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there.”
2. “John Hope Franklin, Scholar and Witness”
“He was famously generous and collegial, even to young scholars, a tall, impeccably dressed man of courtly mien and old-fashioned manners tending his beloved orchids at home in Durham, N.C., like a Southern gentleman of the old school who happened to be black.”
3. “Genre From Another Planet: The ’50s”
“The genius of the Body Snatchers metaphor (the movie is based on a story by Jack Finney) is that it combines the ’50s anxiety about the end of humankind with the era’s equally persistent fears about the toxic effects of mass movements: the Nazism and Fascism that had so recently come close to blowing up the world, the Soviet-style Communism that looked, from these shores, intent on finishing the job. There’s a warning here too about the creeping pressure to conform in our own prosperous middle-class society.”
“For many couples, the queue — the computer list of which films will arrive next in the mail, after those at home are returned — is as important as everything else that spouses and other varieties of significant others share, from pet names to closet space to the bathroom.”
5. “The Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem”
“It seems that — just like the rest of us — celebrities enjoy hearing about other celebrities, and Twitter lets them participate in a giant cross-disciplinary mash-up of a conversation.”
6. “Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?”
“Facebook’s mission, he says, is to be used by everyone in the world to share information seamlessly.”
7. “Neil LaBute Has a Thing About Beauty”
“‘It’s part of my makeup,’ he says, ‘to ruin a perfectly good day for people.’”
“The men he most admires tend to be what he calls ‘amateurs,’ inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, ‘was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.’ It’s a point of pride with Dyson that in 1951 he became a member of the physics faculty at Cornell and then, two years later, moved on to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became an influential man, a pragmatist providing solutions to the military and Congress, and also the 2000 winner of the $1 million Templeton Prize for broadening the understanding of science and religion, an award previously given to Mother Teresa and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — all without ever earning a Ph.D.”
“Not paying taxes — or at least not wanting to — is as American as apple pie.”
