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
September 18, 2015
Regular readers of this blog may remember a few months ago some posts revolving around 79 Theses on Technology that The Infernal Machine graciously published. I got some good feedback on those theses — some positive, some critical, all useful — which allowed me to deepen and extend my thinking, and to discern ways in which it needed...
September 18, 2015
Kwame Anthony Appiah on the two visions of American higher education: One vision focuses on how college can be useful — to its graduates, to employers and to a globally competitive America. When presidential candidates talk about making college more affordable, they often mention those benefits, and they measure them largely in dollars...
September 15, 2015
There is so much that’s wonderful about Sara Hendren’s talk here that I can’t summarize it — and wouldn’t if I could. Please just watch it, and watch to the end, because in the last few minutes of the talk things come together in ways that will be unexpected to those who don’t know Sara. Also be sure to check out Abler....
September 14, 2015
After writing today’s post I couldn’t shake the notion that all this conversation about simplifying and rationalizing language reminded me of something, and then it hit me: Gulliver’s visit to the grand academy of Lagado. A number of the academicians Gulliver meets there are deeply concerned with the irrationality of language, and...
September 14, 2015
William Davies tells us about Mark Zuckerberg’s hope to create an “ultimate communication technology,” and explains how Zuckerberg’s hopes arise from a deep dissatisfaction with and mistrust of the ways humans have always communicated with one another. Nick Carr follows up with a thoughtful supplement: If language is...
September 11, 2015
Let’s try to put a few things together that need to be put together. First, read this post by Jonathan Haidt excerpting and summarizing this article on the culture of campus microaggressions. A key passage: Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people...
September 9, 2015
I think Ian Bogost is correct about the essential boringness of quitpieces — essays or articles or posts by former academics explaining why they bailed out — but it’s hard, for me anyway, not to comment on this one by Oliver Lee, because of Lee’s almost charmingly absolute self-regard. While much of the post is supposed to...
September 8, 2015
This post by “Anonymous Academic” on what the author thinks of as price-gouging by academic publishers is … possibly worrisome, but also possibly misleading. Yes, books that will only be bought by academic libraries tend to be outrageously expensive, but: (a) They cost the publishers money to produce, and in many cases there is...
September 7, 2015
Once you are well inside the world of Elena Ferrante’s just-completed quartet — what English-language reviewers are calling the Neapolitan novels but what is really a single long novel published in four volumes — you are not likely to escape. The books are utterly compelling and the world they create as real as real can be....
September 5, 2015
No surprises here, of course, but when you ask people who teach creative writing in American universities what books they assign, almost all of them assign books written in the past few years. A couple of people reach all the way back to Chinua Achebe, Saul Bellow, and Jean Rhys, and one bold trailblazer — Joel Brouwer, who teaches at...