Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Amazon

  • Today’s Readers, Tomorrow’s Leaders … Perhaps

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Something interesting happened in 2020 that changed my view of the importance of books and snobbish attitudes about their importance. I found out that an author I admire, Jon Ronson, had published two works that I didn’t know about: The Butterfly Effect and The Last Days of August. Ronson is the…

  • Our Own Naked Sun

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ In The Naked Sun (1957), Isaac Asimov imagines Solaria, a low-population world in which residents live on estates so large that one never encounters one’s neighbors in person. As robots are employed in virtually all manner of labor, the only human inhabitants of these estates are their owners. This contrasts…

  • Love, Memory, and Children’s classics

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ All history was palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any…