Douglas Adams continues to be revisited since he migrated over. Here’s a piece he wrote about the ‘net several years ago. How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet: “…We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody

and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and

disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But

that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our

lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.”

Theories that drive one to

abstraction: an erudite condemnation of modernism in art. Telegraph UK And a portrait of American modernism.

At Home With Andrew Solomon: Showing the Demons the Door. Child of a pharmaceutical fortune, Andrew Solomon turned his struggle with depression — he’s now on five medications daily — into what he describes as his big career break by authoring the forthcoming The Noonday Demon: an atlas of depression; the New York Times describes him as “the only serious historian of a sickness that disables more people in the United States than any other.” One FmH reader wrote me several months ago to ask if I knew how many people take Prozac and other related SSRI antidepressants; this article, in passing, provides the answer, a figure of 28 million.

A Debate Over Loved Ones in the E.R.. A pilot project allowing family presence during gruesome resuscitation efforts in the ER is uniformly positive for the families even if their loved one dies; hospital inches toward acceptance. New York Times

Positively 4th Street: the lives and times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. “With this lovely madeleine of a book,

a hauntingly evocative blend of

biography, musicology and pop cultural

history, it is as if David Hajdu has struck a

tuning fork and summoned the spirit of the

folk-singing 1960’s all over again. It is also

as if Mr. Hajdu has discovered that within

every movement, however pure, there is a

healthy whiff of soap opera to be found.” New York Times

Let the culture battle begin. French culture minister seeks to enlist the other G7 nations to join it in battling homogenization of national cultures; proposes extension of the strict rules it has already adopted protecting film, television and publishing industries against dominance by U.S. material. The Globe and Mail By the way, France imposes a $100-per-television-set tax on all viewers to pay for public programming. Imagine such a proposal to fund PBS in the U.S.!