Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
April 20, 2017
“It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.” … He did not pause then so much as wait, as one...
April 19, 2017
This probably belongs on the blog for my How to Think, but since I haven’t started blogging there yet, I’ll just go ahead and put it here. As I’ve said many times, Tim Burke is one of the bloggers — I guess blogging isn’t wholly dead, it’s just mostly dead, like Westley when he’s taken to Miracle Max — who really...
April 18, 2017
A few months ago, when I was doing my Big Pynchon Readthrough, I wrote to a couple of editors I knew and asked them whether they would be less inclined to accept a book about Pynchon if a significant amount of it had been drafted in public, on a blog. Both of them said yes, that it would be a tougher sell to their editorial boards if...
April 17, 2017
The Anthropocene: what until recently geologists had called the Holocene — the Recent Era — they are now increasingly coming to designate as the era of humanity, the era during which the very bones and breath of the earth are being disrupted, broken, and remade by human will. And yet others tell us that the world we inhabit is...
April 17, 2017
I’m back and probably not any better than ever! This post is a bit of a catch-all catch-up before I write a longer one explaining what I’ve been thinking about these past few weeks. One. My next book, How to Think, will be appearing in October from Convergent Books here in the U.S. and Profile Books in the U.K. I’m very happy with...
March 1, 2017
February 28, 2017
Most of what I’m about to say here seems to me quite obvious, and I suspect many of my readers will agree. But if so, then these ideas really ought to be more commonly put forth in debates about pedagogy, like the one I discussed in my previous post. I believe in, and try to practice, pedagogical pluralism. When people argue about the...
February 27, 2017
In general I’m in favor of the idea of defending the lecture, but this piece in Jacobin by Miya Tokumitsu blurs some useful distinctions. Tokumitsu’s argument that the common critique of academic lecturing amounts to an unwitting prop for neoliberalism — “The attack on lectures ultimately participates in neoliberalism’s desire...
February 25, 2017
As I hope my last post illustrates, in general I’m less interested in staking out positions on the issues of the day than I am in uncovering the hidden assumptions that govern many of our debates. It’s not that I don’t have views — sometimes very strong views, though more often, I suppose, “extreme views weakly held” —...
February 25, 2017
One of the most disturbing books I’ve read in a long time is Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. Beck recounts the history of a time when a great many Americans became convinced that day-care workers around the country were regularly abusing and raping children and forcing them to participate in...