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
December 22, 2013
(1) Dim-witted person tweets, or is reported to have said, something dim-witted. (2) Equally dim-witted people notice and tweet their outrage. (3) After a while, brighter people note the kerfuffle and decide to weigh in, either to reinforce or to critique the outrage. (4) These brighter people are followed by even brighter people, who...
December 20, 2013
Let me just be blunt: this Arthur Krystal essay on Erich Auerbach and Mimesis is disappointingly superficial and offers no substantive insights into Auerbach or his great masterpiece. There are two major points to keep in mind if you want to understand the real significance of Auerbach. First, as David Damrosch has noted in the best...
December 19, 2013
Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach and John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven are, as I’m sure many reviewers have already noted, complementary and contrasting books. Gardiner’s emphasis is consistently on the performance of Bach, and on the ways in which historical scholarship has enabled us to...
December 18, 2013
Here at Baylor’s Honors Program, we offer first year seminars that are meant to introduce our students to the challenges and benefits of honors-level work. I’m going to be teaching one of those next year, and here are some of the possibilities I’ve been considering: (1) The Two Cultures: C.P. Snow wrote fifty years ago...
December 18, 2013
Hey folks, I’ve decided to disable comments for this blog. I don’t get a great many comments here anyway, and the constructive conversation about the issues raised here tend to happen on Twitter and in the responses people make on their own blogs. (Same as it ever was.) So check in with me tweetwise!
December 17, 2013
Samuel Arbesman thinks we have a problem: too many specialists, not enough generalists. The age of the polymath is over, but we can bring it back! How? Why, we just need to give people the right tools, that is, we need to “embrace the machines” — the computing machines — and teach everybody to code. “Far from being a...
December 17, 2013
Eli Kintisch’s 2010 book Hack the Planet explores the rise of geoengineering as a response to global warming: Since human beings are apparently unwilling to change their behavior in order to avoid unfortunate effects on the planet’s ecosystem, why not then change the way the planet responds to our behavior? But the chief problem with...
December 13, 2013
“People say they like creativity but they really don’t” is Slate’s summary of a new paper. Having read the paper, “The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas” (PDF), I think Slate is right that that’s the paper’s claim. But I don’t think that’s what the research actually shows. The...
December 13, 2013
Not really on-topic for this blog, but let me say an incoherent word or five about Dana Gioia’s essay on Catholic writing today and Eve Tushnet’s response to it. Since Eve just listed her points without trying to make an argument from them, I shall follow her excellent example. (1) I think the story that Dana tells would look a good...
December 12, 2013
The other day I wrote a post for the Atlantic’s Tech Channel arguing that JSTOR and other academic content aggregators and distributors will be hard to displace — and not just because they wield financial power. They wield that power in part because they offer something that we academics and our students think of as a genuine...