97.12.31
Sites of the Year
A look back at our favorite sites of 1997.
97.12.24
Video Gets Real
Streaming video that goes beyond entertainment.
97.12.18
Speaking in Tongues
AltaVista gets serious about global communication.
97.12.10
Weird News Is Good News
How our eccentricities can bring us together.
97.12.04
Entertainment Asylum
Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.
97.11.26
Terminal Care
Grave sites aren't what they used to be.
97.11.19
Making the eSCENE
Must fiction be print to be hip?
97.11.12
The Living and the Dead
An in-depth look at death in America reveals how stories become the salves of the living.
97.11.05
The Wings of Perseus
The modern-day world of the ancients.
For more, see the complete Web Citations Index.
To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
--James Lee Byars
In 1971, after identifying what he thought to be the hundred most brilliant minds in the world, the late James Lee Byars called each one of them, asked what questions they had been asking themselves recently, and wondered out loud
if they'd be interested in getting together to share their ponderings with
others. The result: seventy people hung up on him. Now, twenty-seven years
later, Byars's dream has come true online.John Brockman -- noted author, digital impresario, and longtime friend of Byars's -- has posted on his Web site, Edge, dozens of penetrating questions submitted by "the most subtle sensibilities" of today's "third culture" (Brockman's term for the scientists and other researchers who "are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meaning of our lives"). The result is a site that has raised electronic discourse on the Web to a whole new level and recalls the origins of the Internet as a tool to facilitate unhampered communication among scientists and academic researchers.
The site regularly features new essays and book excerpts by noted scientific
thinkers. For instance, mathematican turned cognitive
neuropsychologist Stanislaus Dehaene recently offered his paper, "What Are
Numbers, Really? A Cerebral Basis For Numbers Sense." That Edge
makes available Dehaene's paper is not particularly noteworthy; the quality of
response the paper has received, however, is. Such varied and provocative
thinkers as M.I.T. cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist
Howard Gardner, and science writer Margaret Wertheim, among others who have
been invited by Brockman to participate, have all responded to Dehaene's paper
in the form of posts to an electronic message board. The tone and substance of
these posts are thoughtful, challenging, and supportive. Genuine learning seems to be going on here, especially for those whose work is being critiqued. George Dyson, who recently had a book excerpt of his discussed, responded in the electronic forum with, "Many thanks to those who contributed such a fascinating and informed response," before launching into a trenchant eight-paragraph follow up to readers' observations
and questions. One would be hard pressed to justify an expensive academic
conference after reading the stimulating exchange at Edge. James Lee Byars must
be smiling somewhere.Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
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