I miss them too—the revving monsters. The cars that shook coins in your pocket and made streetlights look like dripping mercury. Friday nights once smelled like hot rubber and possibility, and the throttle was a plot device. Need for Speed bleached our retinas; Fast & Furious taught engines to speak in subtitles; TAXI carved Paris into yellow lightning. Those films weren’t about transportation. They were about the physics of desire … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
“The world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel” – Horace Walpole
“Only the Lonely” was the signature song of a guy named Roy Orbison, a star in the early rock’ n’ roll era. Orbison died in 1988 of a heart attack at the age of 52. Songs are full of lonely guys; they were back … Read the rest
Utilitarianism has a terrible publicist. Say “maximize aggregate welfare” at a dinner party and people reach for the cheese knife as if you’d proposed replacing birthdays with quarterly KPI reviews. The brand evokes spreadsheets, grim trade-offs, and philosophers who haven’t seen the sun since dial-up. And yet, the quiet, unfashionable habit of asking “What helps the most people, by how much, at what cost?” is the closest thing civilization has … Read the rest
(Sex as Performance Art)
By Eric Le Roy
Since in life as well as fiction, what gets left out is often even more interesting than what goes in – and since civilization is art as much as anthropology – I have sometimes wondered how sex fits into the Grand Scheme of things, especially from the psychological aspect, and for pleasure as well as mere procreation of species. For … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
The late Anita Roddick, famous female entrepreneur and founder of “Body Shop”, which became incredibly successful, once gave an interview to New English File – a book series used for teaching English as a Second Language. In it, she remarked that, “The world is no longer run by churches or politicians; it is run by corporations.” I hadn’t heard that one before, … Read the rest
