Today's tech helps mostly with retrospective or semantic memory, events or facts we've encountered in the past. Prospective memory is different. It's our ability to remember to remember something -- like stopping to grab the dry cleaning on the way home.

An ode to Nick Drake and London circa 1970.

When "It's Just a Joke" isn't enough.

Why grown-ups embrace the promise of happily ever after, now more than ever.

Post-marathon events reinforced, again, this basic truth: In spite of the instantaneous, multi-platform, transmedia multi-verse of imagery and spectacle by which we subsist, the act of storytelling retains its simple and astonishing power.

Hunting is suddenly fashionable in the United States. But what is remarkable is that this increased interest is coming not from people on the political right, but from those who usually identify with the progressive left.

Laws and the governments that pass them are often evil. We expect our son, instead, to stand up for his rights and those of others -- even if that means breaking the law.

Libraries I've been visiting lately are awash in almost as much noise and activity as a busy Starbucks. I do not think that Mr. Dewey would recognize these places.

The connection between technologically driven abundance and crime statistics.

The pre-technological culture of storytelling has been largely dominated by forces who want to sell us franchises, sequels and transmedia narratives spread across multiple platforms.

Geolocation, social book-reading, and the "Internet of things" -- personal objects that talk to us and each other online -- will all provoke widespread flip-outs.

What has happened in Africa is the same thing that has happened in the West: The idea of time has grown more linear, more compressed, and more accelerated as it pushes forward into the future.

Living abroad is not simply a matter of relocation. It's a matter of mindset. And what you get out of it depends more on what goes on in your head than on your dates of arrival and departure.

Because Pinterest encourages collecting photos based on a theme, this in turn encourages categorical thinking. If you see one picture of a guitar, it's just a guitar; but when you see 80 of them lined up you start to see guitarness.

The Oscar-nominated film "Amour" reminds us that old age and its particular sufferings are part of human life.

Boehner's f-bomb, LaPierre's rant . . . have the white men in power simply lost it?

Our willingness to have our basic beliefs overturned is a sign of intellectual health.

We shouldn't be so quick to blame irony for our waning political commitment. It's the symptom, not the disease.

In the business of ending your life when terminally ill, the means matter a lot more than the final result.

There's nothing objectionable about the new Anna Karenina film starring Keira Knightley. But she won't be my Anna.