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
August 11, 2015
One of my fairly regular subthemes here is the increasing power of algorithms over our daily lives and what Ted Striphas has called “the black box of algorithmic culture”. So I am naturally interested in this interview with Cynthia Dwork on algorithms and bias — more specifically, on the widespread, erroneous, and quite poisonous...
August 7, 2015
Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry (Wikimedia) Suzanne Berne on Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, by Viviane Forrester: But it’s Leonard who gets dragged in front of the firing squad. Not only did he encourage Bell’s patronizing portrayal of Virginia; according to Forrester, he was also responsible for his wife’s only true psychotic...
August 6, 2015
A few years ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences commissioned a report on the place of the humanities and social sciences in America in the coming years — here’s a PDF. And here’s how the report, The Heart of the Matter, begins: Who will lead America into a bright future? Citizens who are educated in the broadest possible...
August 3, 2015
Let’s work through this post by Sebastian Thrun. All of it. You’re at the wheel, tired. You close your eyes, drift from your lane. This time you are lucky. You awaken, scared. If you are smart, you won’t drive again when you are about to fall asleep. Well … people don’t always have a choice about this kind of thing. I...
July 30, 2015
In the last couple of weeks I have published three posts over at The American Conservative on disagreement and its management. One Two Three Since this blog largely deals with technological and academic questions, I tend to move over to AmCon when I have something to say about political and social issues … but there’s a lot of...
July 29, 2015
In his new collection of essays, Mario Vargas Llosa writes, Half a century ago in the United States, it was probably Edmund Wilson, in his articles in The New Yorker or The New Republic, who decided the success or failure of a book, a poem, a novel or an essay. Now the Oprah Winfrey Show makes these decisions. Oh, yes, so true! In...
July 29, 2015
So this interview with Twitter’s Kevin Weil suggests that (a) there will be significant changes coming to the user experience at Twitter and (b) I will hate every single one of them. I’m already annoyed by the recently-implemented “while you were away” feature, since Twitter doesn’t show me everything...
July 29, 2015
Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a historical fantasy, set in late Victorian London, that seems determined to bring in … well, everything you might imagine turning up in a historical fantasy set in late Victorian London: steampunky mechanical things? ✓ dark and narrow London alleyways? ✓ English...
July 21, 2015
Eric Holthaus writes in Slate about a new climate study led by James Hansen that argues that we are likely to see ocean levels rising higher and far more quickly than has been expected. To say that the study is frightening is to master understatement. But right now I just want to call attention to how the study is being presented to the...
July 20, 2015
In Unflattening, Nick Sousanis writes that we need to “discover new ways of seeing, to open spaces for possibilities. It is about finding different perspectives.” Stereoscopic vision reveals “that a single, ‘true’ perspective is false.” Comics “allow for the integration and incorporation of multiple modes and signs and...