2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

closed minds

Peter Conrad: Hillier compares Chesterton to Dr Johnson, whom he physically resembled thanks to his dropsical belly and rolling gait, and whom he often impersonated in pageants. But Johnson’s gruff dismissals – of Scotland, of opera, of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and of anything or anyone who irritated him – were the...

information considered and reconsidered

Here’s a wonderful little post by James Gleick about the meaning of the word “information,” according to the OED. A palace indeed. This reminds of of one of my favorite books, Jeremy Campbell’s Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life — probably the first book I read that suggested serious...

adventurousness and its enemies, part 3

Nick Carr’s post on Craig Mod’s brief for interactive storytelling is more incisive and cogent than mine. Not that that’s any great achievement in itself . . . but just read Nick’s post.

sociopathy

Susan Orlean has written a beautiful, melancholy post about the challenges of dealing with her mother’s physical and mental decline — and having to deal with it from hundreds of miles away. She writes, Sometimes I’m dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything can be for us; that’s the gilded glow of...

class blogs

On Twitter this morning I asked for thoughts on how best to run a class blog, and replies are coming in. People are reminding me of Mark Sample’s excellent post on “blog audits,” and are tossing around other ideas too. When I set up blogs for class I tell students that there are five kinds of participation they can...

adventurousness and its enemies, part 2

It’s not just in writing that the social can militate against innovation: it happens in teaching too. Some administrators want teachers to be willing to tweak their assignments, their syllabi, and their use of class time on a weekly, or even daily, basis, in response to student feedback — and then simultaneously insist that they...

adventurousness and its enemies

Yesterday I wrote that insofar as writing becomes social, it will become less, not more, adventurous. Here’s why: imagine that James Joyce drafts the first episode of Ulysses and posts it online. What sort of feedback will he receive, especially from people who had read his earlier work? Nothing very commendatory, I assure you. By the...

crabwise

Umberto Eco always makes me think: I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by...