Alan N. Shapiro, Technologist and Futurist

Blog and text archive about media theory, science fiction theory, future design, social choreography, Computer Science 2.0, new media art, robots and androids, Star Trek, The Prisoner, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan

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New York Knicks Basketball (story), by Stokes Howell

April 27th, 2012 in Category: American Slang, Creative Writing, Other Sports

Todd and I were going to a basketball game at Madison Square Garden. It was the Knicks' second game in the NBA playoffs. We were hoping it wouldn't be a repeat of the first game, which was as sorry an exhibition of roundball as you'll ever suffer through. The Knicks’ guards couldn't buy a bucket in the fourth quarter.
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Beginner’s Luck (a Casino Gambling story)

February 14th, 2012 in Category: Casino Gambling, Creative Writing, Photography

There was a famous and elegant casino at the Venice Lido called the Casinò Municipale di Venezia. My friends knew about the casino but had never been inside. To my surprise, Tony expressed his belief that I was destined to win a lot of money at blackjack. He announced that he intended to "stake me" money to play.
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Radical skepticism and the logic of Shakespeare’s artistry, by Robert Schneider

February 12th, 2012 in Category: English Literature

Robert Schneider is the author of a book-length reinterpretation of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" called "Shylock, The Roman" (Pulpless.com, 2001). I find this book to be the basis for investigating the relationship between Shakespeare and Star Trek as twin canonical texts of "Western Civ."
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“Point, Click, Love”: A Novel by Molly Shapiro (by Alan N. Shapiro)

January 14th, 2012 in Category: American Literature, Fiction, Social Media

Other commentators will talk about the "chick lit" dimension of the novel "Point, Click, Love." I will talk about the book’s intellectual side.
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The Identity and Anxiety of Colonial Dublin in Joyce’s Dubliners, by James Shapiro

March 20th, 2011 in Category: Irish Literature

Anxiety and self-consciousness are particularly modern maladies, intensified by mechanized technology.
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New York Yankees Baseball (story)

October 25th, 2010 in Category: Baseball, Creative Writing

"Todd and I had had a baseball Jones for months. When game day arrived we jumped into Todd's Chevy and tooled into town for the Yankee game on Saturday night. We were psyched. On the way we were shooting the breeze about the Yankee game the night before, which we had watched at Todd's house on the tube."
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Journal Entry: The Void, by Mary Fox

July 28th, 2010 in Category: Creative Writing, Fiction, Martin Heidegger, P.D. Ouspensky

What follows is neither philosophical, nor academic. It is both self-indulgent and self-referential, as a journal can only be. It presents no “truths” and it is peppered with inconsistencies and flaws, because I am. I began my journal in May of this year in an attempt to retrieve myself from a guilt-ridden existential “tailspin.”
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Around the Town (a Sports Gambling story), part 1 of 4

July 22nd, 2010 in Category: American Slang, Creative Writing, Sports Gambling

As they went inside Grand Central Station, Moe and Siggy saw more hurried commuters moving ahead with tunnel vision. Nobody wanted to look at the homeless. The bag ladies and street people would just put a damper on one’s day.
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Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

April 15th, 2010 in Category: German Literature, The Technological Herbarium

Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the 17th century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those 'secrets', in gaining access to that 'forge', in procuring those 'powers' which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature.
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Gustave Flaubert Laughs at Wikipedia, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 13th, 2010 in Category: French Literature, Wikipedia

In novels like "Sentimental Education" and "Bouvard and Pécuchet", and in his comic inventory of clichés and repeated ideas, Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, Gustave Flaubert made fun of 18th and 19th century attempts to catalogue, classify, list, and record all of scientific and historical knowledge.
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Technology Startup Company (story)

April 13th, 2010 in Category: American Slang, Creative Writing, Utopian High Tech Enterprise

Thank you for calling DigiSoft. All our agents are busy assisting other customers at the moment. If you know the extension you are trying to reach please enter it now. Or you can press one to hold or press two to leave a voice message.
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Times Square Bar (an American Slang story)

April 13th, 2010 in Category: American Slang, Creative Writing

Driving a taxi must be the pits. The cabbies made more money if they got to their destination sooner. So they used every trick in the book to try to gain a few seconds. Running lights was standard procedure. Or they would lay scratch and peel out as soon as the light turned green, leaving the other cars in the dust.