Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form.

Build an "inclusive narrative" that goes beyond race, class, religion, etc., so that all may participate in the "the great debates".

. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.