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 13, 2016
A few weeks ago I took to Twitter to unleash a tweetstorm against tweetstorms. (I was in an ironic mood. Also, if you’re wondering what a tweetstorm is, you can see a few by Mark Andreessen, thought by some to be the originator if not the master of the form, here.) Now I want to make that argument more properly. Hang on tight, we’re...
November 11, 2016
Well, now, this is interesting: And herein lies the seeds of speciation: a difference in a trait that genes influence – intelligence – affecting reproduction patterns. Coupled with policies of exclusion – building a wall, breaking up families to deport undocumented immigrants, targeting specific religious groups unified by their...
November 10, 2016
Alastair Roberts writes, Trump’s argument against vaccines works because people no longer trust the authorities — the governments, the scientists, the medical professionals, etc. — who tell them that they are safe. The biased mainstream media, the liberal elite, lying politicians, activist judges, crony capitalists, politically...
November 8, 2016
a Chinese typewriter There’s a good deal of enthusiasm in this Atlantic post — written by Sarah Zhang, but the enthusiasm is largely that of Tom Mullaney of Stanford — for non-alphabetic modes of text entry. Mullaney is a passionate critic of what he thinks of as Western alphabetic triumphalism, and is an...
November 7, 2016
As John Gruber recently commented, Apple hasn’t upgraded the Mac Pro in more than a thousand days. The company’s indifference to its professional users is puzzling to Marco Arment also: Only the Mac Pro has the space, budget, heat capacity, and PCIe bandwidth to offer high-performance desktop- and professional-grade GPUs. If...
November 4, 2016
I don’t think I’m going to support this Kickstarter project — I am deeply committed to my Leuchtturm notebooks — but I am tempted to do so just to thank Aron Fay for the illustrated history of composition notebooks he has provided on the page. There’s also something kind of fascinating about how Fay...
November 3, 2016
For anyone who wants to understand the complex and ever-shifting relations between technology and education, especially higher education, in America, the one truly indispensable figure is Audrey Watters, who writes at Hack Education. Her most recent post exemplifies why her work is so necessary — and why far, far more people should pay...
November 3, 2016
My family will tell you that I’ve been difficult to be around for the past few days — grumpy, impatient. And there’s a straightforward reason for that: in order to work on revisions for a forthcoming book, I’ve been using Microsoft Word. It’s become so commonplace for people to hate Word that a counterintuitive Slate post...
November 1, 2016
It’s a commonplace that Europeans, and people from several other parts of the world, see Americans as — if they’re inclined to be neutral — “childlike” or — if they’re inclined to be censorious — “children.” In his memoir Paris to the Moon Adam Gopnik quotes approvingly a French friend who comments that you can...
October 31, 2016
I’m not going to enter this contest — I should leave it to people who need the money and the publicity more than I do — but if I were to answer the contest question, Are digital technologies making politics impossible?, I would say something along these lines: No, digital technologies are not making politics impossible, but they...