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
October 12, 2016
This review was commissioned by John Wilson and meant for Books and Culture. Alas, it will not be published there. “Each of us remembers our own first time,” Matthew Kirschenbaum writes near the beginning of his literary history of word processing — but he rightly adds, “at least … those of us of a certain age.” If, like...
October 7, 2016
I’ve been reading Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, and like all Haraway’s work it’s a strange combination of the deeply unconventional and the deeply conventional. Conventional in that formally it’s a standard academic monograph, complete with all the usual apparatus, including not just...
October 5, 2016
“Hah! That’s it! Hold it right there!” And then, knowledgeably, confidentially, to the audience: “Pronoun trouble.” Yes, we’re having lots of pronoun trouble these days — for instance, at the University of Toronto. That story quotes “A. W. Peet, a physics professor who identifies as non-binary and uses the pronoun...
October 5, 2016
Mary Midgley is one of my favorite philosophers. Her The Myths We Live By plays a significant role in a forthcoming book of mine and her essay “On Trying Out One’s New Sword” eviscerates cultural relativism, or what she calls “moral isolationism,” more briefly and elegantly than one would have thought possible. Midgley studied...
October 3, 2016
The Wall Street Journal commissioned this review but in the end didn’t find space for it. Which is cool, because they paid me for it anyway. I offer it here gratis, for your reading pleasure. One of the first attempts to account for literature in terms of evolutionary psychology was provided by Stephen Pinker, in his...
August 10, 2016
Folks, posts will be few and far between here, for a while. I’m working hard on a book, and life in general is sufficiently complicated that I don’t have many unused brain cells. I’m finding it healthier and saner to devote my online time to my tumblr, where I mainly post images that I enjoy contemplating. And you...
August 8, 2016
John Gruber and others are praising this Fast Company feature on Apple, but I don’t see why. It’s all like this: The iPhone will continue to morph, in ways designed to ensure its place as the primary way we interact with and manage our technological experience for the foreseeable future. Apple will sell more devices, but its...
August 6, 2016
Will Self’s meditation on digital imagery in the Guardian is a peculiar one — I’m not sure he quite knows what he wants to say. If I had to sum it up, I’d call it an essay suspended between two fears: first, that digital imagery in the end won’t prove to be a perfectly seamless simulacrum of experience;...
August 5, 2016
Folks, as some of you know, I’ve been working for some time on a book about Christian intellectuals in the second world war. But I’ve set that aside for a while to work on a different project, one prompted by what I guess I’ll call the exigencies of the current moment. It’ll be called How to Think: A Guide for the...
August 3, 2016
Ian Bogost reports on what some people think of as a big moment in the history of international capitalism: At the close of trading this Monday, the top five global companies by market capitalization were all U.S. tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. Bloomberg, which reported on the apparent...