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 5, 2010
David Abrams, new Kindle owner and speculator about the future of reading: While I might initially object to the distraction of video clips in the middle of fiction narrative, I have to remind myself of how many times I’ve been pulled out of “Bleak House” or “Nicholas Nickleby” by the marvelous illustrations...
October 4, 2010
Please don’t miss this wonderful post from Matthew Battles about Nathan Myhrvold’s lavish multivolume celebration of “modernist cuisine”: Modernist Cuisine is essentially a vanity work–a spectacular, brilliantly-produced vanity work, but a work of vanity nonetheless. Myhrvold and the master craftspeople in his service...
October 1, 2010
Follow-up to this post: The end of the interview turned to the future of technology. When Bennet asked about the possibility of a Google “implant,” [Google CEO Eric] Schmidt invoked what the company calls the “creepy line.” “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” he...
October 1, 2010
I don’t think I understand all of William Germano’s essay on what books are good for.“I’ve been wondering lately when books became the enemy.” Wait — are they “the enemy”? For whom?“I’m struck by the fact that the designation ‘scholarly book,’ to name one relevant category, is in itself a back...
September 30, 2010
Arikia Millikan: Now, I am always connected to the Web. The rare exceptions to the rule cause excruciating anxiety. I work online. I play online. I have sex online. I sleep with my smartphone at the foot of my bed and wake up every few hours to check my email in my sleep (something I like to call dreamailing).But it’s not enough...
September 30, 2010
I’m reading and enjoying Andrew Pettegree’s The Book in the Renaissance, and as I move along I can’t stop comparing that moment of textual revolution with our own. For instance, the reluctance of the learned (by and large) to embrace a new technology: The invention of printing was not the work of scholars. Scholars in the fifteenth...
September 29, 2010
“Fortune favors the connected mind.” — Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From. “City ideas, like cities, are fashionable. But fashions change quickly, so city ideas live and die on short cycles. The opposite of city ideas are ‘natural ideas’, which account for the big leaps forward and often appear to...
September 29, 2010
Yesterday I tweeted about Agostino Ramelli’s reading wheel, and this appears to be a subject near to the heart of my editor, Adam Keiper. He sent me a link to a picture of the great historian Anthony Grafton with his own reading wheel — right there next to his laptop, interestingly enough — it’s like a tableau vivant of old and...
September 29, 2010
James Joyce once wrote to a friend that the thought of Ulysses is simple; it’s only the method that’s complex. Much the same could be said of David Mitchell’s extraordinary novel Cloud Atlas), which borrows from Joyce metaphors of reincarnation and a deep commitment to the idea that linguistic style is a way of envisioning and...
September 27, 2010
The Atlantic Tech Canon is fab, but rather skewed towards the present day. I’d like to suggest a few items from most distant eras. (This list is by no means exhaustive or even especially well-considered.) 1) Hugh St. Victor, Didascalion (ca. 1120): Hugh did more than anyone else in the West to organize the knowledge of his time,...