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
November 27, 2013
In his great autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” George Orwell remembers his schooldays: There never was, I suppose, in the history of the world a time when the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it, was so obtrusive as in those years before 1914. It was the age when...
November 25, 2013
Please read this lovely reflection by Frank Chimero on “what screens want” — a gloss on Kevin Kelly’s what technology wants — though Chimero makes this important and (to my mind) necessary pivot near the end: “Let me leave you with this: the point of my writing was to ask what screens want. I think that’s a great question,...
November 25, 2013
(Nah, not really. Just wanted to try out that language for size.) But: I was talking with some people on Twitter this morning about my frustrations with what has now become a very familiar set of experiences: the whole merry-go-round of publicity that accompanies the appearance of a book. Before I go any further, I should note that my...
November 25, 2013
Well, the end of the semester is almost at our throats, so I don’t have much spare time at the moment, but I’ve been spending some of the time I do have with Keith Houston’s delightful book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks. Nice job getting the ampersand...
November 25, 2013
Thomas Larson writes, Here at the end of the four-century reign of books in our culture, which is to say in the digital age, I’m curious about what happens to the Bible, publishing’s crown jewel. Kind of an odd way to talk about the Bible, but okay. Still, are we “at the end of the four-century reign of books in our culture”?...
November 22, 2013
I haven’t read the book Peter Gordon reviews here, but the conceptual frame of the review interests me. (This is sort of off-topic for this blog, by the way.) Here’s a key passage: The grand tradition of philosophical religion thus aims at a symphônia of religion and philosophy. This term has a purely technical meaning, of...
November 21, 2013
So that’s why I don’t like writing with my iPad. But reading — that’s a different story. Last night I picked up Robert Bringhurst’s classic book on typography, The Elements of Typographic Style, and started reading. Or rather, I tried: after just a couple of minutes I realized I was struggling to see the text...
November 20, 2013
Go to a search engine and type in the words “iPad consumption creation.” You’ll be introduced to a debate that has been going on since the first iPad appeared in 2010: is the iPad — and by extension are tablets more generally — built just for consuming media, or is it a device one can make on as well? If we’re going to get...
November 19, 2013
I’ve been really taken by the images in this blog post on the recent resurrection of the cover-design style of the old Pelican Specials. What strikes me, as I expect it will strike you when you click through, is that the attention given to reproducing the old cover art is, shall we say, not quite matched by the attention to typography....
November 18, 2013
If you haven’t done so, you should read Nick Carr’s new essay in the Atlantic on the costs of automation. I’ve been mulling it over and am not sure quite what I think. After describing two air crashes that happened in large part because pilots accustomed to automated flying were unprepared to take proper control of their planes...