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
May 11, 2018
Scripting News: The Internet is going the wrong way: Click a link in a web browser, it should open a web page, not try to open an app which you may not have installed. This is what Apple does with podcasts and now news.# Facebook is taking the place of blogs, but doesn’t permit linking, styles. Posts can’t have titles or...
May 10, 2018
I’ve been mulling over The Avengers: Infinity War for the past few days, and I am ready to offer some evaluative comments. On the plus side, Thanos is maybe the best villain the MCU has produced so far. And there was some witty banter. On the minus side: everything else. This is the only Marvel movie I’ve seen that made me wish I...
May 9, 2018
MyScript has an iPad handwriting app called Nebo – I’ve been trying it out with the Apple Pencil, and it’s quite interesting. I especially like the way it allows you to create simple charts by hand and have them converted into neat images. But if you want to backup/sync your notes to Dropbox or iCloud, you have to create a MyScript...
May 9, 2018
I just wrapped up my course on The History of Disenchantment and one of the interesting elements of the class – well, interesting to me, anyway, but I think also to most of my students – involved the ways that Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment challenges the big narrative of Taylor’s A Secular Age. Taylor’s...
May 7, 2018
The super-cool Robin Sloan has a super-cool newsletter – only occasional, alas, but Robin has many irons in the fire these days. He even makes olive oil. But anyway, in the most recent edition of the newsletter, he makes in passing a fascinating point: There’s something happening in fiction now, and to a degree in film and TV...
May 7, 2018
This lovely remembrance by Sylvia Poggioli of her father, the literary scholar Renato Poggioli, features a letter to her father from W. H. Auden, and the handwritten poem he submitted for publication in the journal Professor Poggioli edited, Inventario. Sylvia Poggioli speaks of her discovery as “a true literary find,” but the letter...
May 5, 2018
Allison Miller tells The Story of the Multigraph Collective, an academic group project that eventuated in a book called Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. I very much want to read the book, but for those interested in the economics of labor in the academy and its effects on scholarship, this...
May 3, 2018
I just came across this fascinating 2015 talk by Mike Caulfield and want to call attention to a couple of elements of it. 1) the garden/stream distinction: The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another. Things in...
May 3, 2018
Hey everybody, sorry for the radio silence — I’ve been traveling, and will be traveling again soon, so I can’t promise regular posting for a while. But I’m hoping to get a few thoughts up here, starting with this: I’ve read two recent posts about computer interface design that really have me thinking. The first is...
April 18, 2018
Alex Reid: From a national perspective, the number of people earning communications degrees (which was negligible in the heyday of English majors 50-60 years ago), surpassed the number getting English degrees around 20 years ago. Since then Communications has held a fairly steady share of graduates as the college population grew, while...