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
August 3, 2009
Over at the Guardian’s Books blog, Philip Hall is remembering the books that meant a great deal to teenagers of his generation. He’s thinking of books that weren’t just popular, but were intellectual touchstones for smart young people — books like Catch-22 and Siddhartha and Slaughterhouse-Five. (I don't know...
August 1, 2009
From the Guardian: A 91-year-old woman from Stranraer in south-west Scotland is believed to be Britain's most prolific library book reader after staff at her local library realised she is on the brink of borrowing her 25,000th book. Louise Brown, who borrowed her first book from Castle Douglas library in 1946, now reads about 12...
July 31, 2009
Brian Cathcart, in Intelligent Life, on matters not unrelated to my previous post: One day last year a daughter of Earl Spencer (who is therefore a niece of Princess Diana) called a taxi to take her and a friend from her family home at Althorp in Northamptonshire to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. She told the driver...
July 31, 2009
One reason I’d like to see changes in the standards of scholarly publication is that I’d like to see changes in the genres of scholarly publication. I wrote in my previous post on this subject about the “tyranny of the monograph,” but the tyranny of the scholarly article is far stronger and more problematic. The...
July 30, 2009
I’ve come across a number of articles lately — here and here and here, for instance — arguing that it’s perfectly correct to use “they” as a generic singular pronoun. I find these arguments compelling, and indeed have long noticed that the British exercise more freedom in this matter than...
July 30, 2009
July 29, 2009
Mark Bauerlein’s article on “Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research” gives me the opportunity to make a couple of points. There’s no question that young scholars in search of tenure — and older scholars in search of promotion to full professor — are being asked to publish too much, especially in a...
July 28, 2009
Not long ago I wrote a post about (among other things) the value of marginal annotations of books, and lo and behold, here's a wonderful little essay on the same subject by Daniel Kalder, of Lost Cosmonaut fame, who discovered a quirkily fascinating friend in the margins of "an account of an Austrian adventurer's clandestine...
July 27, 2009
Folks, posting will be light this week. Forewarned is forearmed.It is my understanding that the requirement to give a (visible!) email address before commenting has been eliminated. I expect the more privacy-focused readers to come out of the woodwork now.Also, some basic HTML formatting is now enabled in the comments: <b> and...
July 24, 2009
It's rare to see a straightforward public apology with nary a weasel-word in it, but that's precisely what Jeff Bezos has produced. Good for him. Not that my concerns are assuaged, but good for him.