Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Author: Nathan

  • At the Movies

    Just up on Religion Dispatches is my article on The Love Guru, which is one of the most pointless films I’ve ever seen. There was wonderful thing about it, though: it was in seeing The Love Guru that I saw—witnessed, experienced—the trailer for Wall-E, which, after a week of fabulous anticipation, I finally got to…

  • Back on the Safety Net

    Here’s to healthcare—yesterday, apparently, marks the beginning of my health insurance coverage through the Freelancers’ Union, a fine internet-based organization that helps out the growing ranks of independent workers. It comes six months, just about to the day, from when my graduate school insurance cut off and I joined the 48 million uninsured Americans. My…

  • All the Web a Wiki

    For a person who does lots of absorbing and creating on the internet, a big new thing can feel incredibly daunting. The specter of Being Behind always lurks as a possibility in the nightmare of waking up to discover that the internet has moved on and left you behind like an old Web 1.0 site.…

  • The Voyage of the Beagle

    I wrote what follows at the beginning of the year, upon first arriving in New York. I sent it in to a contest, and it didn’t win, so I thought it might be fair game to share here. It is called, “The Voyage of the Beagle.” I’m actually not sure if this is the final…

  • An Exercise in Becoming

    For the last three posts I have been exploring the process of becoming. An outgrowth of that, as far as the site goes, has been a rather radical transformation. Rather than being hosted at Small’s Clone Industries, where The Row Boat has lived since it began in 2005, it now lives at www.therowboat.com, a home…

  • Becoming a Professional

    Previously, in “Becoming a Person,” I wrote, with no great originality: Incidentally, coherent personhood has been the assumption behind rational government (all but Louis XIV’s Le etat, c’est moi), especially republican democracy. Voting, opinion polls, representation, and constitutions all depend on the assumption that citizens are coherent persons. The same goes, of course, for all…

  • Becoming a Person

    The New York Times week in review, blessedly (and quoting the fabulous journal The New Atlantis), quotes William James on attention this week. The point, naturally, is yet another condemnation of our relentlessly multitasking, over-busy mental society. But there is so much more in this pregnant piece: To James, steady attention was thus the default…

  • Becoming a Generation

    My generation continues to … flounder. Our biggest news lately was the Iowa caucus, when Barack Obama made a surprising showing, which the exit polls attributed to the youth vote—students had come back early to their campuses to caucus. The next day, as the whole show moved to New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton started making her…

  • The Theory of Double Truth

    Have you ever had the desire, the urge, the dangerous little need to contradict yourself for its own sake? Or for the sake of something quite unspeakable? The words “paradox” and “contradiction” come eerily close to being synonyms—they mean the same encounter of irreconcilables—yet they connote different moods. A contradiction is the dumbest, most obvious…

  • The Local Neighborhood Conspiracy

    Religion Dispatches has just put up my review of Jeff Sharlet’s book, The Family, about a secret Christian political organization headquartered in my hometown of Arlington, Virginia. Like the emperor’s new clothes, power is invisible to those who don’t happen to know about it. One could, as I did, spend eighteen years growing up less…