Posts by Trevor Owen Jones

The United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division estimated that by the end of 2008, for the first time in human history, the Earth's population was more than half concentrated into urban areas. 

The foundational literature of leadership, strategy and war and where to find it in the collections of the NYPL.

Consciousness studies is at the forefront of science's last great investigative projects. While neglected for many years by mainstream academia as a result of dominance by behaviorist psychology, interest in the science of consciousness has exploded in the last decade, with new activity in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and other areas.

How exactly does a material brain... give rise to immaterial thoughts, or "consciousness"?

Many don’t know it, but New York Public Library has a substantial collection of books by influential French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, as well as his multitudinous acolytes. 

This is the final week of the March Reader's Den! We've been reading The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard incompletely, but nothing is truly complete of course without appropriating its own finitude!

"At the age of 16, I discovered Freud and the surrealists, a stick of bombs that fell in front of me and destroyed all the bridges I was hesitating to cross."  —J.G. Ballard

March! What a lovely month to be reading the "poet of the new bad things"!

And we're back!

Today, these are the pieces we'll be covering from The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard:

Sex x technology = the future.

 Welcome to the Reader’s Den! 

This month’s selection is the formidable tome, The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard.

The late, great Ballard died only last year: April 21, 2009. His NY Times obituary is here, and, as it states, “The prescience of Mr. Ballard’s work and its harsh conflation of the present and the future often resulted in comparisons to writers like Huxley or Orwell."