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
April 6, 2015
This is a book about the difference between being a butcher and being a murderer, if there is a difference This is a book about the fungibility of identity This is a book about the persistence of identity This is a book about the relationship between identity and body This is a book about the unforeseen consequences of technology This is...
April 6, 2015
Evgeny Morozov is probably not really “Evgeny Morozov,” but he plays him on the internet and has been doing so for years. It’s a simple role — you tell everyone else writing about technology that they’re wrong — and I suspect that it gets tiring after a while, though Morozov himself has been remarkably consistent in the vigor...
April 3, 2015
1) Those written for young people and of interest and relevance primarily, or exclusively, to young people (e.g., the Sweet Valley High books); 2) Those written for adults and of interest and relevance only to adults (e.g., Nabokov’s novels); 3) Those written for adults that are also sufficiently accessible that they can be...
April 3, 2015
This semester I’m teaching Kierkegaard’s Either/Or for the first time in a decade or so, and I keep having these little moments of insight and recognition that remind me of just how freakishly brilliant SK is. Here’s one example. The most famous section of Either/Or is the “Seducer’s Diary,” which...
April 2, 2015
Let me zero in on what I think is the key paragraph in my friend Chad Wellmon’s response to some of my theses: But this image of a sovereign self governing an internal economy of attention is a poor description of other experiences of the world and ourselves. In addition, it levies an impossible burden of self mastery. A distributive...
April 2, 2015
Two illustrations of a very serious, and very common, intellectual vice: One: When Jon Monfasani write a highly critical evaluation of Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern for Reviews in History, Greenblatt responded — and this is the whole of his response —, “I plead guilty to the Burckhardtianism of...
March 31, 2015
Hello everybody. I’m back from a wonderful visit to the good people at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and am now in the midst of a harrowing game of catch-up. So while regular posting will resume here soon, it won’t resume immediately. At the Institute I presented 79 Theses...
March 24, 2015
I sold my iPad recently, and I don’t expect to buy another one. (By the way, I love the Amazon buy-back program: I got $150 for a device I had used for more than two years. I’ve already spent most of the money on books.) In general I find navigating the iPad cumbersome, though it’s great for reading PDFs and comics. And...
March 22, 2015
I wasn’t going to weigh in on the #readdiversebooks thing, because, after all, I’m the read-at-whim guy so you can guess my opinion about it, but also because if you are going to reject whim and confine your reading to certain approved categories, you could do worse that this. But okay, Saladin Ahmed — you’re the one who...
March 21, 2015
Death is such a bummer, but you know, that’s just a design problem: Bennett’s fixation on death began with the death of his father. He was close to his dad; in a recent talk, he likened his childhood to the plot of Billy Elliot, a story “about a little nelly gay boy who twirled in the northeast of England” and the exceedingly...