2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

Walking Stewart

Walking Stewart

James Bridle’s newspaper-style account of Walking Stewart and his peregrinations through Victorian London.

family tree

family tree

The characters of Kristin Lavransdatter.

mapping The Gift

mapping The Gift

Austin Kleon‘s map of Lewis Hyde’s classic book The Gift. As always, click on the image for a (much) larger version.

Cory Doctorow is making sense

Maximal, abusive, mindless copyright expansion isn’t just a disaster for the public, though. It’s also a disaster for creators. There’s this myth that those of us who write do something different from those of us who read, that there’s a fine line between writers and readers, but I’ve never known anyone to use more information...

Bookfuturism

Bookfuturism is “mapping the future of the book.” Looks very cool — please check it out.

the incomprehending tweeters

It’s hard for me to believe that anyone — anyone — would think it a good idea to project a giant stream of Twitter commentary on a speech while the speaker is giving it — but that’s what they do at the big Web 2.0 conference, with predictably disastrous results for Danah Boyd. Note the comments by Kathy Sierra, who has been on...

Albrecht Dürer, loser

Following 1,000 years of cultural decline and societal collapse known as the Dark Ages, the 15th century brought forth the Renaissance, an unprecedented resurgence in learning and the arts, which four or five guys pretty much just strapped onto their backs and carried the whole way.”Our research indicates that da Vinci,...

the dead among the living

A provocative thought from the wonderful new book A Very Brief History of Eternity, by my friend Carlos Eire: . . . few contrasts can be starker than that between John Calvin’s burial and that of Teresa of Avila. Buried in an unmarked grave outside the walls of Geneva, as per his own instructions, Calvin intentionally made himself...