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
July 4, 2014
Peter Conn is right about one thing: college accreditation is a mess. But his comments about religious colleges are thoughtless, uninformed, and bigoted. Conn is appalled — appalled — that religious colleges can receive accreditation. Why does this appall him? Well, because they have communal statements of faith, and this proves that...
July 3, 2014
Well, I’ve seen some inept commentary on the recent Facebook fiasco, but this definitely takes the cake — and it’s from a Cesar Hidalgo, a prof at MIT, no less. Talk about an inauspicious beginning: First, Facebook is a “micro-broadcasting” platform, meaning that it is not a private diary or a messaging service. This is not an...
July 3, 2014
That’s the title of my New Atlantis essay, now available in full online. Please check it out, and if you’d like to make comments, this is the place to do that.
June 30, 2014
Hannah Sullivan’s outstanding book The Work of Revision came out last year and got less attention than it deserves — though here’s a nice article from the Boston Globe. My review of the book has just appeared in Books and Culture, but it’s behind a paywall — and why, you may ask? Because B&C needs to make ends meet,...
June 29, 2014
This defense of Facebook by Tal Yarkoni is telling in so many ways. Let me count some of them. Yarkoni begins by taking note of the results of the experiment: The largest effect size reported had a Cohen’s d of 0.02–meaning that eliminating a substantial proportion of emotional content from a user’s feed had the monumental effect...
June 28, 2014
Over on Twitter, Robin Sloan pointed me to this post about the Fermi paradox, which got me thinking about that idea again for the first time in a long time. And I find that I still have the same question I’ve had in the past: Where’s the paradox? That Wikipedia article (which is a pretty good one) puts the problem that Fermi...
June 24, 2014
The one great impression I have from this much-lauded film — which I just got around to watching — is how imperceptive, and even incurious, it is about what makes Calvin and Hobbes the best of its genre. There are a good many vague mumbles about its being well-drawn and well-told, and imaginative, and “intimate” (whatever...
June 22, 2014
What, yet another Borg-Complex argument for laptops in the classroom? Yeah. Another one. Laptops are not a “new, trendy thing” as suggested in the final sentence of the article – they are a standard piece of equipment that, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, are owned by 88% of all undergraduate students in...
May 29, 2014
As the year 1942 drew to close, Dietrich Bonhoeffer — just months away from being arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo — sat down to write out ein Rückblick — a look back, a review, a reckoning — of the previous ten years of German experience, that is, of the Nazi years. This look back is also a look forward: it is a document...
May 28, 2014
Trigger warning: specifically Christian reflections ahead. The reason I want to say something about the two recent Twitter tsunamis is that they seem to have some significant, but little-noted, elements in common. I’m going to start with something that I’ve hesitated whether to say, but here goes: I think my lack of enthusiasm...