The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age [Hardcover]

What shapes our sense of place, our sense of time, and our memory? How is technology changing the way we make sense of the world and of ourselves?

Our screens offer us connection, especially now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are certain depths of connection our screens can’t offer—to ourselves, to the natural world, and to each other. In this personal exploration of digital life’s impact on how we see the world, Howard Axelrod marshals science, philosophy, art criticism, pop culture, and his own experience of returning from two years of living in solitude in northern Vermont. The Stars in Our Pockets is a timely reminder of the world around us and the worlds within us—and how, as alienated as we may sometimes feel, they were made for each other.INTRODUCTION
Inner Climate Change

CHAPTER 1
A Map to Our Maps

CHAPTER 2
Clocksetters

CHAPTER 3
Frames

CHAPTER 4
May I Have Your Attention, Please

CHAPTER 5
Identity Theft

CHAPTER 6
Conversational Boxes

CONCLUSION
Let’s Make a Deal

Acknowledgments
Credits
Notes“The Stars in Our Pockets isn’t really a memoir or a polemic but a sequence of meditations on what we risk losing as we offer phones ever more control over our lives…beautiful, elegantly expressed, Axelrod manag[es] to communicate both the strength of his conviction and the difficulty of persuading others to share it.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Axelrod makes a compelling argument for drawing a new kind of map, one that helps us as we search and stumble between thlc,