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 28, 2009
Bill James, so-called "guru of baseball statistics" — he hates that moniker — and general Really Smart Guy, on the past and future of newspapers : You and I entered the scene at a certain point, where each city had one or two big newspapers which had hundreds and hundreds of features, and they had these things when...
April 28, 2009
The Radiohead experiment repeated for a book: Ben Wilson's What Price Liberty? , which you can download from Faber's website and pay whatever you think appropriate. Well, you can if you have a PayPal account, which — after a nightmarish experience last year in which some PayPal employees acknowledged that my account info...
April 27, 2009
Attitudes : 1. Anne Fadiman, the author, was relieved to learn that her essay collection, “Ex Libris,” was not available on Kindle. “It would really be ironic if it were,” she said of the book, which evokes her abiding passion for books as objects. “There’s a little box on Amazon that reads...
April 27, 2009
I’ve written about the everlasting problem of blog comments before, as have many bloggers, and now I see that Virginia Heffernan has weighed in at the NYT. Why do we keep doing this? After all, it’s well-established that Americans in general are poorly-informed about just about everything, and that levels of hostility on the...
April 25, 2009
This Future of Making Map is pretty cool, though I wish I had the real thing rather than a PDF. Thanks to Core77 for the link.
April 24, 2009
Sally Mae Joseph, ‘Now the Word, Jeremiah 1:4-10’, illuminated bible page, 2004. Hill Museum & Manuscript Library Collection. More information here .
April 24, 2009
About ten years ago James O’Donnell published a provocative book called Avatars of the Word: from Papyrus to Cyberspace. The latter chapters of the book turn towards the changing role of teachers in an unprecedentedly information-saturated environment. There’s a good deal of material in these chapters about tenure,...
April 22, 2009
The fabulous web designer Jason Santa Maria on the value of keeping a sketchbook. (Santa Maria usually has a different design for each entry in his blog, so click through and see the fun.) Some months old, but here are some interesting thoughts from then-NEA-head Dana Gioia and Sunil Iyengar on what we know and, more important, what we...
April 22, 2009
Over the next few days, as time permits, — here at Wheaton, we’re getting near the end of the semester, and things are getting a little crazy — I’m going to be responding to Steven Johnson’s recent hyperventilation on digital reading in the Wall Street Journal. This is Johnson in his This-Changes-Everything...
April 21, 2009
Fixed the links on the previous posts (I think). Now there’s no time to write something new. . . .