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
June 8, 2015
I’m going to try to piece a few things together here, so hang on for the ride — I have been reading and enjoying Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, and I’ll have more to say about it here later. I strongly recommend it to you. But today I’m going to talk about something in it I disagree with. On the book’s first...
June 4, 2015
I want to follow up on a recent post, which considered, among other things, the ways that our investment of energy, attention, and money in communications technologies might constrain innovation in other areas. In light of that argument, consider Katie Roiphe’s answer to the question “Which Contemporary Habits Will Be Most...
June 2, 2015
This map of languages around the world is messed up in several ways, some of them easily avoidable, some not so much. But the most notable oddities — the complete neglect of African languages, the absence of the Indian subcontinent from the English bubble — are a product of that curious concept “first language.” If you live in...
June 1, 2015
A brief follow-up to a recent post … Here’s an interesting article by Samuel Loncar called “The Vibrant Religious Life of Silicon Valley, and Why It’s Killing the Economy.” A key passage: The “religion of technology” is not itself new. The late historian David Noble, in his book by that title, traced its...
May 30, 2015
Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves is a typical Neal Stephenson novel: expansive and nearly constantly geeking out over something. If a character in one of Stephenson’s SF novels is about to get into a spacesuit, you know that’ll take five pages because Stephenson will want to tell you about every single element of the...
May 20, 2015
In a recent post I wrote, The hidden relations between these two worlds — Sixties counterculture and today’s Silicon Valley business world — is, I believe, one of the major themes of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction and the chief theme of his late diptych, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. If you want to understand the moral world we’re...
May 18, 2015
I want to spend some time here expanding on a point I made in my previous post, because I think it’s relevant to many, many disputes about historical causation. In that post I argued that people don’t get an impulse to alter their/our biological conformation by reading Richard Rorty or Judith Butler or any other theorists within...
May 18, 2015
There’s much to think and talk about in this report by Rose Eveleth on prosthetics, which makes me think about all the cool work my friend Sara Hendren is doing. But I’m going to set most of that fascinating material aside for now, and zero in on one small passage from Eveleth’s article: More and more amputees, engineers, and...
May 16, 2015
I recently read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which didn’t quite overwhelm me the way it has overwhelmed many others — though I liked it. It’s good, but it could have been great. The post-apocalyptic world is beautifully and convincingly rendered: I kept thinking, Yes: this is indeed what we would value, should all be...
May 11, 2015
Here’s Gary Shteyngart on Saul Bellow: The first time I tackled Ravelstein, back in 2000, this American mind was as open to long-form fiction as any other and I wolfed the novel down in one Saturday between helpings of oxygen and water and little else. Today I find that Bellow’s comment, ‘It is never an easy task to take the...