. . . allatonce everything everywhere . . .
Monday, July 21, 2025 Monday, July 21, 2025. It's the Moon's day . . . The heat dome remains over the U.S. with TulseyTown at the center. Forecasts are near Xeroxes from yesterday with moderate Southerlies maintaining clear skies with heat indices in the 100º+ range this afternoon into the early evening.
Marshall McLuhan was born on today’s date in 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The communication theorist, social philosopher and prophetic media critic, his books and theories are still relevant and influential.
Speaking of McLuhan
Consciousness emerges not as an operation of a mechanical mind but as an embodied interaction between an organic mind and world — a dynamic flow of exchanges in which the whole organism, not just the brain, participates and, in the act of participation, creates itself. – Maria Popova, “Making Up the Mind,” The Marginalian.
Turns out, The Way really can't be told. Is there something necessarily wrong with dark energy and our current cosmological story? Or can we fix the problem and find the right answer, or is science a limited model and not a direct description of reality at all? – The Institute of Arts and Ideas, 7.20.25.
In an age of coral reef bleaching and ecological devastation, researchers playing the sound of a healthy reef with underwater speakers to a dying reef can quantifiably call back the fish and coral polyps and species that have fled, setting up the ecological groundwork for repair. – Sophie Strand, “Ghost Songs & Ecological Resurrection” [not to ignore human]. In Make Me Good Soil, online 20 July 2025.
And, today is the birthdate of Ernest Hemingway. The prolific author was born in 1899 Oak Park, Illinois.
Here's the the wrap up for the past week from Sunday's Civil Discourse by Joyce Vance.
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of [such a] society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.… In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.
– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, original publication by MIT Press, 1964.
By the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we have built the shape and meaning of Western man.
– Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962.