Human beings have the remarkable ability to transcend physical space and time with nothing more than imagination. This ability, combined with a deeply-rooted thirst for stories about ourselves—the unfolding narratives that allow us to make sense of our own actions and those of others—constitute the very essence of humanity. But now, enabled by our technologies, everything from high-speed communications to virtual reality, we have trapped ourselves in a vicious positive feedback loop that encourages us to make simple-minded interpretations.

Our technology transforms us into simple caricatures of ourselves and then we become those caricatures. We have traded a universe filled with marvels for the Marvel Universe. The cost of this trade has been a deep denigration of what it really means to be a complex, vital, and fully realized human being.

We swallow fatuously oversimplified “scientific” accounts of ourselves with nary a whimper. Not only do we allow ourselves to be counted, sorted, and categorized by artificially intelligent machines, but we embrace the insights provided by those machines as if they constitute deep and unassailable truths about our nature. We tolerate drab, homogeneous, placeless cities and neighborhoods as though the settings of our lives didn’t matter. Without a massive destabilizing event like a global pandemic, it might have been possible for civilization to continue to sleepwalk into this diminished, algorithmic, machinic version of ourselves without even noticing—indeed we are well on the way to this sorry state.

But we can wake up. There’s still time left to fix us. That’s what The Cartesian Rift is about.

PRAISE FOR PLACES OF THE HEART

“He manages to write in a register that is both explicatory for a mass audience and nerdy enough for those familiar with the fields he glosses. Ellard’s greatest talent lies in sketching the contours of complex issues without overlooking their rough edges.” — QUILL & QUIRE

“From Stonehenge to the African savannah, the book is filled with stories both personal and professional that offer profound lessons about the psychology of places…Ellard is most compelling when describing his own experiments and their results, producing gems that will help architects and urban planners in their everyday practice.” — SPACING MAGAZINE

“This beautifully written book grabs the reader from the start, with personal stories from the author’s life interwoven with history, archeology, technology, and design.” — ESTHER M. STERNBERG M.D., author of Healing Spaces

PRAISE FOR YOU ARE HERE

“Delightfully lucid…Ellard has a knack for distilling obscure scientific theories into practical wisdom.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES

“[A] fascinating and exhaustive rundown of the processes involved in keeping us and other animals moving in the right direction … an absorbing read.”
 — THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“One of the finest science writers I've ever read…. It's fun, pure fun.”
 — THE LOS ANGELES TIMES