(I even prefer the penultimate sentence of Reimer's post.)
there was a lot of [desktop publishing] bad work. But the worst of it was better than the bad work that had been done on earlier technology.
Well, not always; Mac font foofoo nearly killed a living tradition of good daily calligraphy at my college. But I'd agree that within a few years it was pulling the average up.
The more people noodle with any art, the better audiences we should be for the few genius masters.
The reactor on which I used to be licensed had a pretty little doodah from the 1920s that neatly lowered a lump of radium into your morning orange-juice. Radium was Modern and Scientific, and therefore healthy...
To the peculiar danger-response thresholds described above, I would add a modern assumption that any scientific advance will be either vital or lethal. I don't know if this assumption is based on headline stories' exaggerated views, or on some inheritance from Aristotelian drama.
A tangential book recommendation, based on someone's skepticism that slavery would be as clear an issue if we had been rich, free and white in 1855; The Southern Lady, Anne Firor Scott; University Press of Virginia, 1995. Has diary excerpts showing an enormous range of reaction by white women, who could conclude that slavery was an evil either because it was hard on the slaves or because it was hard on the white women. Remarkably outspoken, some of them, and more of them bitter in their diaries.
Neither slavery nor the war is central to the book; I recommend it as a sidelight for the imagination.
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