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
June 9, 2009
I despise the recently constant chatter about Twitter, and here I am adding to it twice in twenty-four hours. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) On Twitter I follow, basically, some friends, some Mac sites, and . . . this: an hourly feed of prayers attributed to St. John...
June 9, 2009
I wrote an article a while back about the ancient tradition of keeping a commonplace book — and about my contemporary version, which is on a kind of hiatus at the moment. And now I learn from Daniel Seidel that he has started a website, mycommonplacebook.org, where people can create online commonplace books and share them with...
June 8, 2009
The page takes a long time to load, but don't miss it; or you could browse the related Flickr pages. Wow. Here's a sample:And another:
June 8, 2009
Very funny piece on Slate about "orphaned tweets" — people who set up a Twitter account, posted one tweet, and then never returned. Think of them as a series of miniature Beckett plays and they take on a certain eerieness. "Sitting next to a big, hairy, smelly guy on the bus." "weeping gently." And...
June 6, 2009
Ron Numbers is one of our leading historians of science and pseudo-science — his The Creationists is the definitive account of that strange movement — and he has edited a fascinating new book called Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. At the Harvard UP website you can download a nice excerpt from...
June 4, 2009
I mentioned in an earlier post Dave Eggers's promise to buck you up if you're in despair about the future of print. Well, he has come through.
June 4, 2009
There have been some problems with the comments, but I think they’re fixed now. Fire at will.
June 4, 2009
Louis Menand's long essay in the New Yorker on Mark McGurl's new book The Program Era is, typically, superb. McGurl's book deals largely with the relationship between creative writing programs and recent American fiction. Here's an excerpt from Menand's review: A second thing that “The Program Era” does...
June 4, 2009
Teemu Manninen ruminates: Enter the papernet: the internet as a platform for producing, on demand, paper products (maps, organisers, notebooks, social travel guides and the like). Imagine, for instance, that your printer had its own email-address, and instead of your newspaper delivered to your door each morning, your printer would print...
June 3, 2009
The well-known computer scientist/entrepreneur Philip Greenspun has a recent post which is an interesting combination of insight and nonsense. Nonsense first. Greenspun writes, “The pre-1990 commercial publishing world supported two lengths of manuscript: 1. the five-page magazine article, serving as filler among the ads; 2. the...