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
October 7, 2013
My “biography” of the Book of Common Prayer is now available and I hope some of you will buy it. It was a great deal of fun to write — though I have to say, I found it extremely challenging to fit an extremely complex story into the relatively brief format of the series. Speaking of the series, it’s a wonderful one, created by...
October 4, 2013
I have one one thing to say about this statement from a MIT professor about the Aaron Swartz tragedy, and that’s that the piece doesn’t say anything. It’s supposed to point the way beyond the big report on how MIT dealt with Swartz, but it doesn’t. It just cycles through some typically vacuous boilerplate administrative prose: We...
October 2, 2013
image via Grantland So, mainly to spite Ross Douthat, I watched the finale (“Felina”) of Breaking Bad. It was impressive in every respect. But of course there’s no way for me, even as someone who knows the plot of the series and how the major themes have developed over time, to understand the episode completely or to get the full...
October 2, 2013
Interesting little comment by Nicholson Baker about something he does in his new novel: The odd thing about the reaction to this book is that almost everybody is most interested in the fact that I included a YouTube URL in the book. Such a tiny thing, but in the moment I thought: okay, I’ll be really adventurous. I didn’t know it...
September 30, 2013
In essays and books, Evgeny Morozov has outlined four intellectual pathologies of the code-literate and code-celebrant: populism, utopianism, internet-centrism, and solutionism. These are fuzzy overlapping categories and Morozov still seems to be in search of a stable set of terms to articulate his critique. We might simplify matters by...
September 30, 2013
Two recent articles from the Guardian make nice companion pieces for reflection: a profile of Simon Schama and one of Malcolm Gladwell. Each article raises an important question: What counts as valid (useful, responsible) popularization of a subject? Here’s Oliver Burkeman writing about Gladwell: We are now sufficiently far into the...
September 27, 2013
So today on Twitter I asked: Best book on CSS for a n00b? — Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) September 27, 2013 I mainly got recommendations for websites, which is cool, but some of the people who recommended websites were extremely adamant that it is totally wrong to try to learn CSS from a book. “Books are probably the absolute worst way to...
September 27, 2013
I’ve recently noticed a number of apps devoted to increasing reading speed: here’s a review of a couple of them. Whenever I think about speed-reading, my mind casts back to a story I read when I was a teenager — a story I discuss in my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Let me quote myself: Consider a story by...
September 27, 2013
Johann Michael Bretschneider (1656-1727), Scholars in a study. Poznan, National Museum in Poznan These new studies of the relations between messiness and creativity are really interesting, but it raises two questions for me: 1) Does the correlation between messiness and creativity persist over time? The studies seem to focus on how...
September 26, 2013
A few months ago, Farhad Manjoo of Slate got a lot of attention — well, in my Twitter feed anyway — by writing a post telling us “Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.” Why? Because “Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong. The case he makes is largely...