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
March 12, 2018
Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs project is “reimagining cities to improve quality of life.” But what might “quality of life” actually mean? As Emily Badger notes in a recent essay about the tech visionaries of the urban, It’s … unclear what you’d optimize an entire city for. Technologists describe noble aspirations like...
March 10, 2018
In response to my previous post on this subject, my friend Chad Wellmon sent me a link to a (paywalled) essay by his colleague Elizabeth Barnes on the value of responding to offensive ideas. Barnes makes a useful distinction between ideas that are deeply offensive but not widely or seriously held — an argument in defense of rape, for...
March 9, 2018
When I spoke at Duke a couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to visit with some of the students of Walter Sinnot-Armstrong. (Walter is a delightful fellow, by the way, and has a book coming out later this year, Think Again, that I am presumptuous enough to see as an excellent sequel to How to Think.) The students were supposed to...
March 9, 2018
A few weeks ago I deleted my private Twitter account — it was a good way to keep up with friends, but I found it impossible to control it (via disabled RTs, muted strings, etc.) well enough to prevent the frustration from exceeding the pleasure. That left me just with my public account, which I have been using primarily for linking to...
March 7, 2018
Obviously it’s good to admit you’re wrong when you’re wrong — because we’re all gonna be wrong, often — but it’s even better to try to understand how you went astray in the first place. So why did I misinterpret Graeber and Wengrow’s argument? I think I did so because I have seen all too often a series of steps...
March 6, 2018
In a wonderful review-essay in the most recent issue of The New Atlantis, Adam Roberts argues that farmers were the first time-travelers: It is certainly possible to imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors living in some bestial, continuous present of consciousness, their experience of time pricked out with moments of intensity — the...
March 5, 2018
This fascinating article by David Graeber and David Wengrow challenges a strongly established historical account — one, they say, having its origins primarily in the work of Rousseau — that posits, in the early human era, egalitarian hunter-gatherer cultures displaced by farming cultures that brought technological...
March 4, 2018
Hi. I’m back. Not sure how much I’ll be posting, but I have a great many ideas that I want to try out, so please join me in the comments. A few little notes about what I’ve been up to: My book How to Think came out last fall. My book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis will be out in August. My...
September 5, 2017
I had thought that I might be able to resume at least some blogging here, but it’s just not going to happen. Too much to do — and soon I will begin blogging in support of my forthcoming book How to Think. Please keep an eye on that site, if thinking is the kind of thing you’re into. I am still of course fascinated by...
September 1, 2017
While I’m on the twofold subject of (a) reading outside my speciality and (b) asking for help, I want to say something about the theologian Ephraim Radner. Several people I know and admire very much have encouraged me to read Radner, whom they in turn admire very much, and for a good many years now I have tried, repeatedly. But...