A book is a beginning. In the last decade, when some might have said the book was dead, books have really come alive for me. Some may be inclined to say that books are not living things—but I know differently: books, libraries, are not inert, and there is more than meets the eye. There they sit,
I met Marshall McLuhan when he replaced me as a guest lecturer at Fordham University in September of 1967. That’s the story I’ve been telling all these years, and it’s mostly true. John Culkin, S.J., who had an uncanny talent for keeping his ear to the ground, learned in the spring of 1967 that I
It was a drizzly day in New York in the Spring of 1977, if memory serves. I was more than halfway through with my PhD in the Media Ecology Program at New York University, and Neil Postman was my doctorial dissertation advisor. I went up to see him in his office off Washington Square Park.
I first met Marshall McLuhan in 1974 at the Coach House on the campus of St. Michael’s College, the University of Toronto. I was a professor of physics carrying out research in theoretical elementary particle physics, lecturing undergrad and grad courses and supervising grad students. In addition to these straight forward duties of a physics