Rambles at starchamber.com

“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” -Ralph W. Sockman. Magic is a slippery word. Does it refer to a trick or a glimpse of something deeper? This simple question has always puzzled me. This little essay is my attempt to nail down why that is. I want to talk [...]

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Salem, Massachusetts is in love with witches. It took three hundred years or so for them to come around, but they’ve fallen in a big way. I spent some time in Salem this weekend, and I can attest that, in addition to the various museums and tours, the “witch on a broom” motif is everywhere, [...]

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You may have heard about Engrish.com, the site that tracks amusing abuses of the English language in Japan (“Let’s happy and feel the lucky!”). But what about the view from the other side? Are Americans abusing Asian languages by any chance? Yes they are, and whereas Japanese have a knack for zany T-shirts and signs, [...]

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Quick: which is more important? Reason or wonder? Don’t tell me you need more information… just answer the question. Which is more important? And which is more powerful? They clearly have a tangled relationship. Science fiction authors and scientists are always quoting each other. Arthur C. Clarke, quoting himself, famously conflated magic and technology: “Any [...]

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The rest of the country is way past baseball by now (did I hear something about an election of some kind?), but happy Boston is still wallowing in sloppy postcoital bliss. In fact, it took a dedicated Red Sox fan to call the Series interesting at all. To the untrained eye, all the action this [...]

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