2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

you do this, you do that

Rachel Cooke writes, “Amazon does not set the synapses crackling the way the sight of a pristine shelf of books does: it does not surprise you, nor does it fuel book hunger. You click on what you came for, and then you leave.”One of my most common frustrations in reading evaluations of recent technologies of...

Google’s value

One unnamed “prominent media executive” leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: What real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society?Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps?...

discovering an artist

discovering an artist

Thanks to things magazine, I have just learned about the illustrations of Eric Ravilious (1903-1942). Beautiful stuff.

the powers of paper

Don’t know how bookish this is, but it’s a testament to the magnificent adaptability of paper. Here, with a hat to to Ari Schulman.

adventures in assigning causation

James Parker: [Roald] Dahl was not religious by temperament or philosophy, and this seems important. Compare his bristling, stinking, unmetaphorical characters with the watery allegories of the Harry Potter cycle — and his prose with J.K. Rowling’s — and you begin to see that a supernatural frame of reference might not always...

there’s no such thing as a free netbook

Great question from Glyn Moody at Slashdot: The response to Google’s Chromium OS has been rather lukewarm. But suppose it’s just part of something much bigger: a netbook computer from Google that would cost absolutely nothing. Because all the apps and data are stored in the cloud, storage requirements would be minimal; screens are...

tools of the trade

These are the applications I use most often on my MacBook, in descending order: 1) My web browser is OmniWeb. Despite a somewhat archaic appearance — drawers in Mac apps are so 2003 — it’s the most feature-rich browser in the Mac world, and the features are well-chosen and well-designed. I’m especially attached to its workspaces...

Gene Wolfe’s Sun

Over at the Guardian, Alison Flood has been reading some science fiction and fantasy classics, and has gotten around to Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series — the first half of it, anyway. She is impressed, as she should be. But I have never been quite sure how highly to rate this series. It’s brilliant in so many ways,...

the disappearance of all things human

Finally, a reasonable, measured, intellectual substantive critique of electronic books, from Alan Kaufman: The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be...

one last video

British Pathe – ( EARLY TRAFFIC SCENES ) – Watch more Videos at Vodpod. Not really about about anything connected to this blog, but amazing stuff. From here, via Brian.