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 12, 2009
Simon Callow on Michael Slater’s new biography of Dickens: The book is an incomparable portrait of the writing life of Dickens. Cumulatively, it is profoundly moving, chronicling the constant restless interaction between the life and the work. Slater quotes to immensely touching effect the account by Forster, Dickens’s best...
October 9, 2009
Here. I like the mix of genres — even children’s books get some of the prizes — but many of these choices are frankly bizarre. Twilight for 2005?
October 9, 2009
I just turned in to my friends at First Things a review of the new book by Sir Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England, so it will be a few months before the review appears. But I would like to quote my own opening paragraph: The Ends of Life is one of the most enjoyable, provocative, and instructive...
October 9, 2009
I wonder if this ever happens to anyone else: surprisingly often, when I read about a new piece of software, I can’t figure out what the software actually does, or is supposed to do. I suppose that means that I am not in the target audience for the app, but I’m not the target audience for many apps that I perfectly well...
October 7, 2009
Here’s an excellent essay by Darragh McManus celebrating Günter Grass’s great novel The Tin Drum on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication — but make sure you scroll down for the semi-dissent from commenter sWords.
October 5, 2009
That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Now I know that Google could never be evil!
October 5, 2009
My English 215 students are beginning serious work on their first essays now. Most of them will write on the Iliad or the Odyssey, though a few will pursue Aeschylus’s Oresteia. As I talk with them about their ideas, I am reminded of something that I’m reminded of every year at this time: that students are primarily interested in...
October 3, 2009
This essay by Lewis Hyde is typical of almost everything I’m reading about the Google Book Settlement. Here’s the usual structure: 1) We agree that there are many, many “orphaned” works out there — works published within the period of copyright law but whose copyright owners canot be found; 2) We agree that it’s a problem...
October 2, 2009
From the brilliant economist and economic historian Deirdre McCloskey: “She describes herself as a postmodern free-market quantitative rhetorical Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian woman who was once a man.”
October 2, 2009
My essay on Iain M. Banks‘s novels about the future civilization he calls the Culture — from the most recent issue of The New Atlantis — is now available online. If you have any comments, this would be the place for them.