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
August 5, 2014
I’m going to disagree, a bit, in a way, with Robert George’s Advice to Young Scholars: Although it is natural and, in itself, good to desire and even seek affirmation, do not fall in love with applause. It is a drug. When you get some of it, you crave more. It can easily deflect you from your mission and vocation. In the end, what...
August 4, 2014
Funny, the little things that annoy a person. For example: when someone tweets a link and prefaces it with “The best thing you’ll read today.” Well, first of all, bub, what makes you think I’ll read it at all? Just because you link to it? I don’t think so. But second, even if I do read it, how do you know what else I might...
August 4, 2014
A kindness tracker. That’s what this is. You can keep track of all of your good deeds, and — here’s the key thing — you can compete with others in kindness competitions. And then when you kick their stupid loser butts you can do this:
August 1, 2014
From the conclusion of Adrian Johns’s remarkable book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates: The confrontation between piracy and the intellectual property defense industry is perhaps set to trigger a radical transformation in the relation between creativity and commercial life. That idea is not as...
August 1, 2014
This essay by Catherine Tumber is disappointingly empty, but also indicative of a certain and all-too-common mode of thought. It seems that Tumber has read almost nothing in the digital humanities except Adam Kirsch’s recent critique of that multifaceted movement, and — remarkably enough! — she agrees with Kirsch, “whom we...
August 1, 2014
Rebecca Mead writes about The Scourge of “Relatability”: What are the qualities that make a work ‘relatable,’ and why have these qualities come to be so highly valued? To seek to see oneself in a work of art is nothing new, nor is it new to enjoy the sensation. Since Freud theorized the process of identification—as a...
July 31, 2014
The Power of the Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory: Recent research in neuroscience, psychology and design shows that doodling can help people stay focused, grasp new concepts and retain information. A blank page also can serve as an extended playing field for the brain, allowing people to revise and improve on creative thoughts and...
July 31, 2014
I’ve been enjoying and profiting from James Poulos’s ongoing analysis of what he calls the “pink police state”: see installments to date here and here. This passage from the second essay strikes me as especially noteworthy: The new regime is not totalitarian, fascist, socialist, capitalist, conservative, or liberal, according...
July 26, 2014
Please read this wonderful post by Tim Burke on what liberal-arts education can and can’t do — or rather, what we who love it can plausibly claim on its behalf and what we can’t. Excerpt: No academic (I hope) would say that education is required to achieve wisdom. In fact, it is sometimes the opposite: knowing more about the world...
July 25, 2014
Please forgive me for ignoring the main thrust of this post by William Deresiewicz. I’m just going to comment on one brief but strange passage: A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize 30 lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Nearly every single kid got every single line correct. It...