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, 2016
I’m still thinking about the myths and metaphors we live by, especially the myths and metaphors that have made modernity, and the world keeps giving me food for thought. So speaking of food, recently I was listening to a BBC Radio show about food — I think it was this one — and one of the people interviewed was Ken Albala, a...
July 30, 2016
Hello, Someone has signed up for your service using my email address. (And, interestingly, using this name.) Please delete my email address from your database. The email I got welcoming me to your service came from a no-reply address, so I had to go to your website and dig around until I found a contact form. I see that you require me to...
July 28, 2016
One of the most common refrains in the aftermath of the Brexit vote was that the British electorate had acted irrationally in rejecting the advice and ignoring the predictions of economic experts. But economic experts have a truly remarkable history of getting things wrong. And it turns out, as Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast...
July 25, 2016
I can’t say too much about this right now, but I have been working with some very smart people on a kind of State of the Humanities document — and yes, I know there are hundreds of those, but ours differs from the others by being really good. In the process of drafting a document, I wrote a section that … well, it...
July 19, 2016
For a project I’m working on, and will be able to say something about later, I re-read Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, and I have to say: It’s a really superb book. I read it when it first came out, but I was knee-deep in writing at the time and I don’t think I absorbed it as fully as I should have. I quote...
July 17, 2016
Dennis Cooper, a writer and artist, is a pretty unsavory character, so in an ideal world I wouldn’t choose him as a poster boy for the point I want to make, but … recently Google deleted his account, and along with it, 14 years of blog posts. And they are quite within their rights to do so. People, if you blog, no matter on...
July 11, 2016
Another Kim Stanley Robinson novel, and another set of profoundly mixed feelings. Green Earth, which was published last year, is a condensation into a single volume of three novels that appeared in the middle of the last decade and are generally known as the Science in the Capital trilogy. Robinson is an extraordinarily intelligent...
July 9, 2016
Maciej Ceglowski tells us that Pinboard turns seven today. I started using Pinboard on July 14, 2009, so I’ve been there since it was about a week old. (Didn’t realize that until just now.) I think Pinboard is just the greatest thing, and I can’t even really explain why. I suppose because it primarily does one...
July 7, 2016
It’s been widely reported that in the past couple of years e-book sales have leveled off. Barring some currently unforeseen innovations — and those could certainly happen at any time — we have a situation in which a relatively few people read books on dedicated e-readers like the Kindle, considerably more people read on the...
July 6, 2016
At least, wanted in government, and by Farhad Manjoo, who laments the shutdown of the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995. Of course, the future doesn’t stop coming just because you stop planning for it. Technological change has only sped up since the 1990s. Notwithstanding questions about its impact on the economy, there seems no...