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 20, 2014
Maria Bustillos’s review of Nick Carr’s new book The Glass Cage is really, really badly done. Let me illustrate with just one example (it’s a corker): In the case of aviation, the answer is crystal clear, yet Carr somehow manages to draw the opposite conclusion from the one supported by facts. In a panicky chapter describing fatal...
September 17, 2014
Please read Robin Sloan’s wonderful reflection on Minecraft — or rather, the implications of the game for people who enjoy thinking about generative engines and collaborative creation. Here’s what gets Robin’s wheels turning. As a Minecraft beginner you might find yourself presented with something like this: But...
September 17, 2014
The conclusion of this Jason Kottke post got me thinking: People ascribe all sorts of crazy stuff to you without knowing anything about the context of your actual life. I even lost real-life friends because my online actions as a person were viewed through a conceptual lens; basically: “you shouldn’t have acted in that way because of...
September 16, 2014
When I returned from the physical shock of Nagasaki, which I have described in the first page of this book, I tried to persuade my colleagues in governments and in the United Nations that Nagasaki should be preserved exactly as it was then. I wanted all future conferences on disarmament, and on other issues which weigh the fates of...
September 12, 2014
A sudden consensus seems to be emerging among a subset of current-event commentators: there are big problems with with term “civility.” Here’s the claim, summed up: Instead I’ll simply say this: “civility” is often invoked by those in power as a shorthand for those encounters that they can dominate...
September 12, 2014
Sviatoslav Richter When I learned to play the guitar, many years ago, I developed a near-obsession with the musical virtue of articulation. I’m not sure why; maybe because I found it so hard to play without slurring notes or missing them altogether, and without introducing unintentional variations in volume. I came to love guitarists,...
September 10, 2014
I’m reading the first volume of David Bromwich’s projected two-volume intellectual biography of Edmund Burke, and it’s fantastic. A magnificent piece of scholarship, about which I hope to have more to say. But in my typically perverse way, I’m going to devote this post to a disagreement — though not to be ornery, I promise. I...
September 6, 2014
Yuval Noah Harari introduces his new book Sapiens: We are far more powerful than our ancestors, but are we much happier? Historians seldom stop to ponder this question, yet ultimately, isn’t it what history is all about? Our understanding and our judgment of, say, the worldwide spread of monotheistic religion surely depends on whether...
September 5, 2014
Alex Reid is very unhappy with teachers like me who ban laptops (and other internet-enabled devices) from class. I’ve written about this a number of times before, so let me put it in a nutshell: My students are in class with me for two-and-a-half hours, 150 minutes, per week. During those 150 minutes I choose to focus on our using,...
September 5, 2014
I can’t write something orderly and coherent about David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, which I finished yesterday, but I want to record some responses. There are no major plot spoilers in what follows, but maybe some mood or tone or context spoilers. I’m trying to be relatively discreet, but caveat lector and all that.. 1) If you...