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
September 26, 2013
Myst was the first computer game I bought — I had played some text-adventure games that I borrowed from friends, but didn’t shell out money until I had my first computer with a color monitor (A Macintosh Performa 6116CD, if you must know). I played Myst a lot: I struggled to solve many of the puzzles but just couldn’t let...
September 24, 2013
In the best book yet written on my favorite twentieth-century thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson describe the influence of Tolstoy on Bakhtin, especially Tolstoy’s emphasis on the cumulative effect of tiny decisions and thoughts on a person’s whole life. Here’s a key...
September 23, 2013
A while back I was writing about the mysteries of adherence, that is, why some people manage to discipline themselves in ways that they need to while others do not. I want to return here to that theme to relate a fable — but a true fable. The man in the photograph above is William Joseph Cobb, better known in his wrestling days as...
September 20, 2013
I don’t want to do it any more. I explain why here. Feel free to dismantle my reasoning in the comments below.
September 20, 2013
Maria Konnikova writes about the practice of “redshirting,” that is, starting kids’ schooling at a later age so they’ll be among the older rather than among the younger kids in class: On the surface, redshirting seems to make sense in the academic realm, too. The capabilities of a child’s brain increase at a rapid...
September 19, 2013
The problem with Instapaper’s new Popularity Sort — essentially, an engine for finding out what everyone else is reading on Instapaper and suggesting that you read it too — is that it does what so many other social media do: exacerbate the gap between the attentional haves and have-nots. It’s a matter of inertia: posts...
September 18, 2013
As I said I would, I’ve been thinking more about Sara Hendren’s recent essay on assistive technology, and her claim that “all technology is assistive technology.” The key variable is what we’re trying to assist. These thoughts are consonant with the view articulated by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of...
September 18, 2013
I’ve been thinking a good deal about a recent blog post by Adam Roberts, a fine scholar and even better novelist whose work you should know. (Here are some thoughts of mine about his fascinating book New Model Army). In this post he’s reflecting on the general tendency among the literati to dismiss science fiction and fantasy...
September 17, 2013
I was talking with some friends on Twitter the other day about the ever-shortening definition of what gets counted as a “long read” — it’s enough to make me more sympathetic to those shrinking-attention-span arguments that I tend otherwise to be skeptical towards. Medium tells me, in its highly annoying way, that this essay...
September 16, 2013
It was easy. I just confessed that I don’t watch Breaking Bad. @ayjay You’re crazy. Seriously. I don’t even know what to say. — Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 13, 2013 Or maybe the crazy thing is that I don’t watch the show but still read about it, I’m not sure — Ross seemed pretty distraught and I...