This evening I went to a lecture that easily ranks in my top 5 lecture experiences of all time, by the writer and historian John Stilgoe. His lecture style has been described as "a journey, a walk, or a drive," and its true -  he meandered and hopped and broke from the beaten path so frequently and so delightfully that at the end you were surprised to see him returning back to the slide he started from, having come full circle through such disparate themes as globalization, railroads, women in advertising, shop theory, gastronomic color theory, sustainability, wooden boats, and photography. At the end, Michael and Elana and I looked at each other with amazement because he'd managed to say fruitful and interesting things about pretty much every thesis topic in our class.

For me the lecture was particularly interesting because Stilgoe has some ties to the phenomenological philosophy tradition, and often talks about the ways in which technology - particularly the screen - is changing the way we observe and "read" the world around us.

Tonight I'll be adding one of his books, Outside Lies Magic, to my reading list.