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
June 2, 2011
Interesting to see both Jonathan Franzen and David Brooks speaking to and about college graduates in ways that suggest an attempt to channel David Foster Wallace’s great Kenyon commencement speech — Brooks in substance only, Franzen in substance and tone alike. Neither of them work very well. Brooks’s essay, while thoughtful and...
June 1, 2011
People who have been using a Mac for a long time can find Google Chrome painful to look at. Some of the reasons for that are outlined in this post by Majd Taby, but there are others. There’s a general lack of fit and finish: for instance, if you have folders in your bookmark bar in Chrome, click on one of them; then do the same in...
May 31, 2011
You know what annoys me? Well, actually, that would be a long list. You know one thing that annoys me? The way some people on the internet use the word “curator.” People find cool stuff online and put links to that cool stuff on their website, and they say that they’re “curating” the internet. When Jorn Barger invented that...
May 27, 2011
This essay by Margaret Morganroth Gullette on memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease has a provocative title: “Our Irrational Fear of Forgetting.” So, what’s irrational about a fear of forgetting? At one point Gullette says “People over 55 dread getting Alzheimer’s more than any other disease, according to a 2010 survey by the...
May 25, 2011
Bill Pannapacker writes about the dying grandmother problem — and for college teachers it’s a big one. Every semester, just as the big end-of-term assignments come around, the grandparents start dropping like flies. I haven’t known how to handle this any better than Pannapacker does, but a few weeks before his essay came out I...
May 24, 2011
Hey everyone, look at the awesome new banner my friend Brad Cathey of Highgate Cross made for the blog. Cool, is it not? Brad, by the way, is also responsible for the beautiful design of Gospel of the Trees. I am once again in his debt.
May 24, 2011
Zeynep Tufekci has written a long, thoughtful, and worthy-of-contemplation post on Bill Keller’s recent rant against Twitter. An excerpt: And Bill Keller should understand that, at its best, Twitter is not a broadcast medium but a medium of conversation. What he has done so far on Twitter is the equivalent of walking into a party and...
May 23, 2011
There are some excellent and helpful thoughts in this post by Megan McArdle, for instance: A lot of the reaction to any new technology is simply that many of us invested a lot of effort in learning how to use the old technology well. That’s especially true of books. (It’s no accident that so many of the complaints come from...
May 22, 2011
When I read this introductory paragraph to a story by John Noble Wilford — In the thousand years between the decline of Rome and the springtime of the Renaissance, science and other branches of learning took a holiday throughout Europe. It was a benighted time in the history most of us raced through in school, skipping lightly through...
May 20, 2011
[View the story “The NYT in India” on Storify] These things just surge and fade — they appear out of nowhere and then, after a flurry of exchanges, they subside. It’s an insult to the intrinsically ephemerality of the thing to preserve an exchange in this way — but just for purposes of illustration I’ll do it...