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 31, 2016
What I have been calling the technological history of modernity is in part a story about the power of recognizing how certain technologies work — and the penalties imposed on those who fail to grasp their logic. In his early book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt tells a story: In 1531 a lawyer named James Bainham, son of...
October 28, 2016
Amitav Ghosh asks, “Where Is the Fiction About Climate Change?” When I try to think of writers whose imaginative work has communicated a more specific sense of the accelerating changes in our environment, I find myself at a loss; of literary novelists writing in English only a handful of names come to mind: Margaret Atwood, Kurt...
October 26, 2016
Posting continues to be light and rare around here because I’m still slaving away at two books — one and two — but I am not a machine, so I spend some time each day reading for fun. And the other day I was possessed by an unexpected, sudden, and irresistible urge to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. I’m about halfway...
October 26, 2016
Jonathan Haidt explains “Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice.” When my friend Chad Wellmon (on Twitter) questioned Haidt’s dichotomy, I agreed that there is a problem. After all, people who are promoting social justice in he university think that their beliefs are true! But I also think Haidt has a point...
October 21, 2016
As I’ve mentioned before, I have been working with colleagues for some time now on a document about the future of the humanities, both within and without the university — more about that in due course. And some of my recent work has been devoted to this constellation of issues: see this review-essay in Books and Culture and this...
October 19, 2016
If you don’t subscribe to Robin Sloan’s P R I M E S newsletter, you should. In the most recent edition he talks about this video: Robin says this video is “wonderful for its evolving sound and also for its inscrutability. I mean, how is he making those noises? How has he learned to play that monstrous instrument??...
October 19, 2016
Farhad Manjoo thinks the Clinton campaign email scandal proves that email in general needs to be ditched: Email sometimes tricks us into feeling efficient, but it rarely is. Because it’s asynchronous, and because there are no limits on space and time, it often leads to endless, pointless ruminations. If they had ditched email and just...
October 19, 2016
Please, please read this fascinating essay by Maria Bustillos about her daughter’s diagnosis of MS — and how doctors can become blind to some highly promising forms of treatment. The problem? The belief, drilled into doctors and scientists at every stage of their education, that double-blind randomized tests are not just the gold...
October 17, 2016
So many things I wish I could write about; so little time to do anything but work on those darn books. But at least I can call your attention to a few of those provocations. I’ll do one today, others later this week. John Gray’s review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus makes some vital distinctions that enthusiastic futurists like...
October 14, 2016
Catching up on a topic dear to my heart: here’s a fine essay in Comment by J. Mark Bertrand on printed and digital Bibles. A key passage: Pastors and scholars rely heavily on software like BibleWorks and Accordance, and laypeople in church are more likely to open Bible apps on their phones than to carry printed editions. The days are...