The New Yorker on Al Gore:

In his uninterrupted answer, he mentioned the brain-imaging center at New York University; "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess," by Leonard Shlain; "Broca's Brain," by Carl Sagan; an Op-Ed piece in the Times about the decline of reading in America, by Andrew Solomon; the lack of research on the relation between the brain and television-- "There is just nothing on the dendrite level about watching television,"; Gutenberg and the rise of print; the sovereign rule of reason in the Enlightenment; individualism-- "a term first used by de Tocqueville to describe America in the eighteen-thirties"; Thomas Paine; Benjamin Franklin. "O.K., now fast-forward through the telegraph, the phonograph." O.K., but we didn't fast-forward: first, there was Samuel Morse, who failed to hear the news of his wife's dying while he was painting a portrait-- "You know, he has a painting in the White House, if I remember correctly” --and therefore went out and invented a faster means of communication. "Now fast-forward again to Marconi . . . now that's an interesting story", the sinking of the Titanic; David Sarnoff; the agricultural origin of the term "broadcast"; moving right along to "the nineteen visual centers of the brain"; an article on "flow" in Scientific American; the "orienting reflex" in vertebrates; the poignancy and "ultimate failure" of political demonstrations as a means of engaging the aforementioned public sphere-- "I mean, what do you really have? A crowd of people holding posters with five words on them at most hoping for a TV camera to come along for a few seconds of airtime,” --and, finally, Gore's own 1969 Harvard thesis, on the effect of television on the Presidency and the rise, at about that time, of image over print as a means of transmitting news. This was all a way to talk about the cable-television station that he is developing.

"What kind of station will it be?" I asked.

"Well, I really can't talk about it,"? he said. "Not yet."