Christopher Hitchens on the Grape and the Grain

A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—​the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—​is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea.

What the internet is doing to our minds

HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey” the machine is being dismantled, its wires unplugged: “My mind is going,” HAL says. “I can feel it.”
For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. “I can feel it too,” he writes. “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.”