Friday links! This modern world edition

Minds more astute than mine have pointed out that the time machine must be impossible, because if it will have beeninvented, we surely would have had visitors from the future by now. Maybe, though, they just don’t want us to bore them with arguments about how especially crazy everything is now. Surely our present moment constitutes an ordinary broomstroke in the sweep of history, but it seems crazy and futuristic. Ours is an age shocked by its own novelty. Whether we’re lauding the world-changing potential of Twitter or decrying the precipitous fall of old-fashioned morality, we seem to be a nation out of time, blithely declaring each day the turning point we’ve all been waiting for or the final goodbye of the world we once knew. As Bob Dylan once said, the times, this is going to be a really short concert because I am super old. In preparation for the last weekend of the beginning of our lives, Combat! blog presents links to stories that indicate the onset of a new age, if only by our panicked resentment of the change. Won’t you turn a little of the future into the past with us?

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