Ryan Sayre Patrico noted yesterday how he heard the news of his two friends’ deaths last week on Facebook: “The horrible news was announced almost immediately on the popular social-networking website, sandwiched between two other people declaring that their weekend hadn’t lived up to their expectations.”
For an insightful read on how social-networking sites are changing how we view friendship and how we communicate, look to Christine Rosen’s New Atlantis essay, ” Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism .”
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…