The ISHV Cyber Think Tank is a digest of articles, interviews, and other musings compiled by Robert B. Tapp.

John Brockman’s new book, Universe, should be must reading for humanists, along with his unique set of programs. “Edge at its core, consists of the scientists, artists, philosophers, technologists, and entrepreneurs at the center of today’s intellectual, technological, and scientific landscape. Through its lectures, master classes, and annual dinners in California, London, Paris, and New York, Edge gathers together the “third-culture” scientific intellectuals and technology pioneers exploring the themes of the post-industrial age. These are the people who are rewriting our global culture.
And its website, Edge.org, is a conversation. The online Edge.org salon is a living document of millions of words that charts the conversation over the past eighteen years. It is available, gratis, to the general public.” read
George Marsden’s new book, “The Twilight of the American Enlightenment., The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief,” is critically reviewed by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. Marsden correctly describes “the twilight of the American Enlightenment,” by which he means the cultural and intellectual assumptions of the Founding Fathers: human freedom, equality of rights, rationality, the scientific method and male leadership.” Marsden sees this as once quite accommodated to the mainline Protestant dominance. But the Catholicism, the Religious Right, and a failure to become more pluralistic intervened.read
Heidi Ledford on how we dislike being alone with our thoughts. read
A. C. Grayling reviews Barbara Ehrenreich. ". . . it is a disappointment when a rational person’s thinking about the unusual, the unexpected, the extraordinary, the amazing experiences of transcendence and unity that many of us have at heightened moments of life, suffers a declension into quasi-religious or supernaturalistic vagueness. The human brain is complicated enough to produce all these experiences from its own resources; we need no fairies in the garden to explain how roses bloom.” read
Walter Isaacson’s Jefferson Lecture on humanities and science (1h, 16 min). watch
Christopher Bray on the “catfight” between Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher. read
Michael Robbins reviews Nick Spencer’s “Atheists: The Origin of the Species,” a history critical of the “new atheists.” “The point is not that a coherent morality requires theism, but that the moral language taken for granted by liberal modernity is a fragmented ruin: It rejects metaphysics but exists only because of prior metaphysical commitments. A coherent atheism would understand this, because it would be aware of its own history.” read
Astra Taylor’s contention that technology is destroying culture is critiqued by Tim Wu. read