cover image Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left

Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left

Mark C. Taylor. Yale Univ, $28.50 (400p) ISBN 978-0-300-20647-0

With panache and flashes of brilliance, Taylor (After God), a Columbia University religion professor and cultural critic, offers a philosophically astute analysis of how time works in our era: more is being squeezed into smaller and smaller bits of time, and everyone feels that they have less of it. Email has, in part, created this time warp, but technology is inseparable from larger economic and philosophical forces. Taylor offers some occasionally potted history lessons, such as how the Protestant Reformation, the invention of the clock, and the rise of consumer credit all contributed to our current state. In the present, he touches on Google Glass and financial markets, as well as citing familiar, but nonetheless disturbing, data about how many texts people send, and our inability or refusal to actually enjoy leisure on our days off. Society has become fragmented, reflective subjectivity has morphed into “competitive individualism,” and, ironically the “values that have allowed Western capitalism to thrive now threaten its collapse.” There is, appropriately, no quick fix, but Taylor provides plenty of provocative, learned ideas. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group. [em](Oct.) [/em]