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
December 11, 2013
Just a brief couple of comments on the whole snark-vs.-smarm Ultimate Revenge Cage Match that was kicked off by Tom Scocca in this article: One: Scocca’s way of distinguishing between snark and smarm is completely incoherent. “Smarm,” he says, “would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t...
December 9, 2013
These thoughts were originally formulated in the context of a faculty seminar at Wheaton College on theology and technology, but I thought it might be worthwhile to share them here. The “we” invoked at several points here may be taken to mean, generally and non-exclusively, “Christians in the academy,” but there are many others...
December 9, 2013
You know how I wrote that blog post a whole back about how much I hate writing on my iPad? Apparently not everyone feels that way: Most people only use the iPad’s on-screen keyboard for tapping out emails, tweets or Facebook updates. But Patrick Rhone of St. Paul wrote a book that way — with his Apple tablet at a slight...
December 7, 2013
At some point in my senior year of high school I told my parents that I wanted to go to college, and they shrugged. It wasn’t a choice they had much sympathy with, and they were not inclined to offer any financial support — indeed, they were probably unable: my mother’s job was not a high-paying one and my father worked...
December 5, 2013
I’m a big fan of Iain Sinclair’s work — which I’ve written about at some length here — and I think Ray Davies is one of the most interesting people in the history of rock-and-roll, for reasons I explain a bit here and here. So how happy was I see see this joint profile of the two of them, focused on their common...
December 4, 2013
Here’s a brief but interesting story about Worldreader: A former Amazon executive who helped Jeff Bezos turn shopping into a digital experience has set out to end illiteracy. David Risher is now the head of Worldreader, a nonprofit organization that brings e-books to kids in developing countries through Kindles and cellphones. ...
December 4, 2013
Jonathan Myerson has standards. Not for him the craven apologies of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Kent, their admission of wrongdoing at having suggested that children’s literature isn’t really literature at all. Myerson hoists his literary flag: Come on, University of Kent, why the grovelling retreat? Your...
December 3, 2013
After all the agitation and bipolar oscillation of the first four acts of Hamlet, by the end the prince seems to be at peace. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” he has learned; and when faced with the possibility of death, he knows that “the readiness is all.” And yet that readiness doesn’t actually answer any...
November 30, 2013
I was having some fun on Twitter this morning with this piece of prophetic silliness — silly even for the a-scientist-predicts-the-future genre, which is saying a lot. Computers will disappear! — because they will be ubiquitous, and I’m sure there’s no need even to wonder if ubiquitous computing could be useful to ubiquitous...
November 29, 2013
Recently I was reading a lovely autobiographical essay by Zadie Smith about — well, in the way of the true essay, it’s about several things: gardens, civility, grief, memory. Much of it concerns her travels with her late father, and those scenes are beautifully rendered. And then I came to her description of the Borghese Gardens in...