E. O. Wilson: Trailhead : The New Yorker (+ Jaron Lanier in Harper's)

A few colony/hive themes to ponder on a sunny Saturday morning:

From the latest issue of The New Yorker – an excerpt of beautiful writing by E. O. Wilson:

The Trailhead Queen was dead. At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed. Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/01/25/100125fi_fiction_wilson?currentPage=all#ixzz0dRghJATE

(Hmm – the Web designers at The New Yorker automatically inserted the link above when I copied/pasted into Windows Live Writer; very handy…)

From the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine – The Serfdom of Crowds, by Jaron Lanier. Harper’s has not made the full article available to non-subscribers, but I found it on this page; an excerpt:

At the time the Web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out to be exceptionally bland. The members of "Generation X" were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnett saw in them the phenomenon of pattern exhaustion, in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative. A common rationalization in the fledgling world of digital culture back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm - or were already in the eye of one. But we were not passing through a momentary calm. We had, rather, entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will escape it only when we kill the hive.

I’m hopeful both publications will be available in full digital content subscription options sometime soon -- maybe on the Apple tablet :) -- in the meantime, I am a very happy subscriber to the dead-tree editions of both.

p.s. you can download an extensive sample of Jaron Lanier's latest book, You Are Not a Gadget, on this page; if you don't have a Kindle, download the free Kindle client app here

E. O. Wilson: Trailhead : The New Yorker