Big Brother is Writing A Modernist Novel About You

The novelist Richard Powers recently declared in a Times op-ed piece that privacy is a "vanishing illusion" and that the struggle over the encryption of digital communications is therefore as "great with consequence" as the Cold War. Powers defines "the private" as "that part of life that goes unregistered," and he sees in the digital footprints we leave whenever we charge things the approach of "that moment when each person's every living day will become a Bloomsday, recorded in complete detail and reproducible with a few deft keystrokes." It is scary, of course, to think that the mystery of our identities might be reducible to finite data sequences. That Powers can seriously compare credit-card fraud and intercepted cell-phone calls to thermonuclear incineration, however, speaks mainly to the infectiousness of privacy panic. Where, after all, is it "registered" what Powers or anybody else is thinking, seeing, saying, wishing, planning, dreaming, and feeling ashamed of? A digital Ulysses consisting of nothing but a list of its hero's purchases and other recordable transactions might run, at most, to four pages: was there really nothing more to Bloom's day?

--from "Imperial Bedroom," in How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen. Originally appeared in 1998.

Adventures in Public Health

Duemling said a contra doctor requested 60,000 containers of dental floss and thousands of toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste to start a major dental care program for the contra troops and their families.

But contra military leaders said few Nicaraguans use dental floss and questioned whether the department should have filled that part of the order.

"We're guerillas," one said. "We don't floss our teeth."

--from the Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1987.

"You can speak freely here, Jamison - we're all secular humanists."

That attachment to human life which demands that it be chosen over everything else is mostly humbug. It can be reasonably, if not decisively, argued that the world is already suffering from a surfeit of such animals; that most human beings rarely deserve the esteem some philosophers have for them; that historically humans have treated their pets better than they have treated one another; that no one is so essential he or she cannot be replaced a thousand times over; that death is inevitable anyhow; that it is our sense of community and our own identity which lead us to persist in our parochial overestimation; that it is rather a wish of philosophers than a fact that man be more important than anything else that's mortal, since nature remains mum and scarcely supports the idea, nor do the actions of man himself. Man makes a worse God than God, and when God was alive, he knew it.

--from "Goodness Knows Nothing of Beauty," by William Gass

What Aristotle and N'Sync have in Common

"Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought, indeed, any mode of thought whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else, is just like the fashions that we wear -- only much longer-lived. It's a little like a boy band."

"Scientific thought a boy band? How do you figure that?"

"Well, every now and then a boy band comes along. We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on TV, idolize them right up until--"

"--the next boy band?" I suggested.

"Precisely. Aristotle was a boy band. A very good one, but only number six or seven. He was the best boy band until Isaac Newton, but even Newton was transplanted by an even newer boy band. Same haircuts -- but different moves."

"Einstein, right?"

"Right. Do you see what I'm saying?"

--Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde, p. 61.

Top Ten Words of 2004

I see that Merriam-Webster has just announced the Words of the Year 2004. In other words, these are the words most frequently looked up online, at the Merriam-Webster site. (Because I know you'll ask, #1 on the list was "blog," followed by "incumbent" and "electoral." One can imagine why those words ended up on the list, and I assume that "peloton" shows up because of the Tour de France.

But riddle me this: why in the heck did "defenestration" make #10?