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 4, 2015
Freddie deBoer imagines a kind of universal trigger warning, perhaps to be issued to students on their arrival at college: You’re going to be exposed to stuff you don’t like at college. We will try to give you a heads up about the stuff that might upset you, but what is considered potentially offensive is an inherently political,...
September 3, 2015
Charles McGrath writes, “Who isn’t a critic? We are born picky and judgmental, and as we get older we only become more opinionated and more sure of ourselves.” Is that true? I think I’m less sure of myself now than I ever have been. Or maybe that’s not quite right. My tastes are perhaps more limited, even fixed, than they once...
August 31, 2015
We’ve heard a lot in recent years about the decline in American states’ support for higher education — which has indeed been happening — with the implicit or explicit corollary worry that this decline is leading to the privatization of the university, the subjugation of academe to the demands of the marketplace, etc. And...
August 31, 2015
My friend Adam Roberts, whose critical judgment is superb, loved Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel Aurora; I didn’t. At all. And while such differences in literary experience are inevitable and commonplace — “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like” is the most truthful of all reviews —...
August 28, 2015
In this exchange on literary difficulty I think Leslie Jamison gives us something far more useful than Heller. Here’s Heller: Recently, when I read Christine Schutt’s short story “You Drive” with a graduate writing class, several of the students complained that they found the story baffling. They couldn’t make out the...
August 26, 2015
It seems to me that one of the most universal and significant differences between young people and their elders is the emotional resilience of the young. Most young people — the damaged always excepted — can plunge into the deepest and wildest waters of their inner lives because they know that they have what it takes to take the...
August 24, 2015
We all have to find ways to manage our social-media lives. I have a few rules about engaging with other people, developed over the past several years, which I hold to pretty firmly, though not with absolute consistency. 1) If on Twitter or in blog comments you’re not using your real name, I won’t reply to you. 2) I never read...
August 24, 2015
Perhaps the chief thing I learned from my post on podcasting is that a great many people take “podcast” to mean something like “any non-music audio you can listen to on your smartphone.” Okay, fair enough; the term often is used that way. And I sort of used it that way myself, even though I didn’t really mean to. This made my...
August 18, 2015
Just a quick follow-up to a comment I made on Twitter. Over the past several years I have listened to dozens and dozens of podcasts, on a very wide range of subjects, with the result that there is now not a single podcast that I listen to regularly. Podcasts, overall, are (1) People struggling to articulate for you stuff you could find...
August 17, 2015
Until this morning I was certain that I had posted this some weeks ago … but I can’t find it. So maybe not. Apologies if this is, after all, a rerun. One of the chief themes of Peter Harrison’s recent book The Territories of Science and Religion is the major semantic alteration both terms of his title — science...