Church of God the Utterly Indifferent
Ted Castronova Who’s in charge, anyway? We believe that we have free will, but perhaps we are under the control of a higher being. What if that being is under the control of another being? Who is under the control of another, and so on and so on? Andrew Dabrowski of Indiana University’s mathematics department has developed a metaphysical theory …
Ed Comentale You might think it would be nice to go to a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and see all the different ways to be absolutely right, but it is a very dangerous thing to do. The poor man and his poor dog are scattered far and wide, not just through space, but through time, too. (9) Every once in …
Jonathan Elmer “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.” “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole.” Taken together, these two sentences—the first is the opening line of The Sirens of Titan (1959); the second comes from an interview in 1977—capture a style of assertion, unique to Vonnegut, that veers wildly from pontification …
Cooper Harriss In college I worked summers at a camp near the North Carolina coast, an outpost so remote that an evening’s entertainment often took the form of riding the free ferry some three miles across the Neuse River and back. On one occasion I struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger, a local commercial fisherman who …
Sarah Phillips Anthropologists think a lot about bodies. Biological anthropologists are interested in the adaptation, variation, and evolutionary history of humans and their relatives, looking at the bodies of humans and our ancestors, living and extinct. Medical anthropologists investigate the human body from a range of perspectives, focusing on how perceptions and experiences of the body and of …
“Here’s a little paradox courtesy of The Sirens of Titan: There is nothing worse than being used, and nothing worse than not being used.”
