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 1, 2009
From the website : "Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as...
March 31, 2009
I’m with Steven Frank on this: For years I’ve had this bordering on Howard Hughesian vision that one day I would have a giant, private, wiki-like document that had a page containing everything I knew about anything. It would be complete, readable, editable, and searchable from whichever device I happened to have on me, from...
March 31, 2009
This is the kind of thing that drives me to distraction: a post by Kevin Kelly on what he would call the opposition to technology: I believe we have a moral obligation to increase the power and presence of technology in the world, but not everyone believes that – to put it mildly. Many believe the opposite: that we have a moral...
March 30, 2009
This is Alison Bechdel's review in the NYT of Jane Vandenburgh's A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: You can see a larger version here.Why shouldn't there be more of this kind of thing? I can imagine that there would be many books — not all, not most, but many — that would be very well served by...
March 29, 2009
Via the Blogoscoped blog, something interesting about searching and sorting data. If you read that post, you’ll see a little snippet of code that you can copy. Go to the Google home page, paste that code into your address bar and hit return, and you will discover that future search results will be accompanied by a link called...
March 24, 2009
I’m off first thing in the morning for a visit to the Pacific Northwest — I’m going to be speaking at a retreat for the very fine MFA program in creative writing at Seattle Pacific University — so I’ll be back online next week. Cheers! (link fixed)
March 24, 2009
Here are the first two paragraphs of George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language”: Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and...
March 23, 2009
In the past few years there has been a great deal of conversation about the present and future of public libraries — especially, it seems to me, in the U.K. Here’s an interesting recent article, full of the usual, and as far as I can tell completely warranted, anxieties. In the midst of all this concern, though, there are a...
March 23, 2009
For years now I have followed the same general practice when trying to read something online, especially on a newspaper or magazine site: first, stumble across an interesting article; second, look for a “print option” so that I can rescue the article from the surrounding noise and clutter of ads and links; third, increase the...
March 21, 2009
Jacob Weisberg is worried about becoming a Kindle bore. Yeah. Been there. I've sworn off further posts on the subject.