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
November 29, 2016
I’m not so sure about this argument by Hossein Derakhshan: Before I went to prison, I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books. Then for six years I...
November 28, 2016
In The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie writes, What then does it mean to be modern? As the term is used in everyday discourse, being modern means being fashionable, up to date, contemporary. This common usage actually captures a great deal of the truth of the matter, even if the deeper meaning and significance...
November 24, 2016
For the past decade or more I’ve fiddled around with learning to code: when I first began I tried to learn some Perl, then later Python, then Ruby, then back to Python again. But I’ve never been able to stick with it for any significant period of time, and I think the chief reason is this: I still have no idea what I would ever do...
November 22, 2016
In yesterday’s post on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy I quoted Adam Roberts commenting on the “niceness” of KSR’s characters, and it might be worth noting that in his own fiction Adam rarely gives us nice characters. Sometimes they’re decent enough people, though in exceptionally challenging...
November 21, 2016
I just re-read Kim Stanley Robinson’s magnificent Mars trilogy — about which I hope to teach a class someday — and every time I go back to those books I find myself responding differently, and to different elements of the story. Which is a sign of how good they are, I think. Some have described the Mars trilogy as a kind of utopia,...
November 21, 2016
On Kickstarter, I supported Craig Mod’s Koya Bound project, which preserves in book form a record of an eight-day walk along the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail in Japan. The book has arrived and it’s absolutely gorgeous.
November 18, 2016
Last year I published an essay here at The New Atlantis called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity.” Would you be so kind as to click that link and read the first few paragraphs? Feel free to stop at this sentence: “All you know about them is what they say of themselves — this is, in a nutshell, one of the core...
November 18, 2016
The builders of fictional worlds, in science fiction and fantasy, come in two chief types, the meticulous and the speculative. The meticulous world-builder delights us by thoroughness of invention, the speculative by surprisingness. For the former, and for readers of the former, much of the pleasure of a fictional world arises from the...
November 16, 2016
Maybe I should have been writing about Facebook instead of Twitter, but never mind, because my friend Brian Phillips has done it for me. But along the way Brian writes, What had really happened was that the left had become sensitized to the ways in which conventional moral language tended to shore up existing privilege and power, and had...
November 14, 2016
We don’t usually do politics here at Text Patterns, but I sort of sent us down that road in my last post. So: I think Twitter’s atomizing, paratactic tendency, its constant pressure to squeeze thoughts into tiny boxes, exacerbates and intensifies a common intellectual vice: monocausalism. So far there have been, according to my...