the baffler

Is the profession of science broken (a possible cause of the great stagnation)?

By / 25 Comments / 24 September 2014

The rate of technological progress has slowed, broadly speaking since the 1960’s. The most commonly cited example is the speed of flight. The astronauts of Apollo 10 traveled at 25,000 in 1969, the same year the first and only successful supersonic commercial airliner flew. Now we have neither. Worse there are indications that the basic …

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Tom Clancy, manufacturer of myths that kept us happy & ignorant

By / 14 Comments / 7 January 2018

Summary: We loved Tom Clancy’s fiction because it gave a realistic gloss to our myths about ourselves, about America, and about our military and intel agencies. Unfortunately millions of his readers believed they were seeing an accurate picture. In fact Clancy got the details right, but most of the big things totally wrong. Gorbachev was …

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Are you reading the new journalism, or do you still wear the blinders of the old?

By / 7 Comments / 10 September 2015

The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is …

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