2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

busyness continues . . .

. . . which means that I haven’t been able to blog here. I have managed, though, to post some quotes to my tumblelog. A poor substitute, I know, but hey, they’re pretty cool quotes.

brief hiatus

I’ll be traveling for a few days, folks, so no new posts until late next week.

education as a public good

In a typically smart column about online education, my friend Reihan Salam quotes Anya Kamenetz: The only way to restore the concept of higher education as a public good is to reinvent it as a truly public good: not subject to antiquated notions of scarcity and hierarchical expertise, but adapted to the current reality of free, open, and...

making connections

One of Tim Burke’s colleagues is a little concerned about the breadth of interests represented by Tim’s syllabi: My colleague suggested to me that I had to be responsible first (and last) to my discipline and my specialization in my teaching, that there was something unseemly about the heavy admixture of literature and popular...

plusses and minuses

. . . of the iPad as a reading device. The minuses: Terrible screen glare, even indoors. Fingerprints on the screen are a major problem: they’re more visible than on the iPhone, especially when reading (because your eyes are on the screen for a long time without a break). It’s awfully heavy in comparison to the Kindle,...

the commodification of intimacy

This sobering post from Nick Carr suggests that we ought to be worried, or at least seriously reflective, about “web revolutionaries” who are pushing the commercialism and commodification of human intimacy: What most characterizes today’s web revolutionaries is their rigorously apolitical and ahistorical perspectives — their...

more changes

Speaking of personal vacillation and changeableness, remember how I returned my iPad? Yeah, well, I got another one, and basically for one purpose: teaching. The iPad, it turns out, is a great tool for teachers. I don’t rely heavily on presentation software (Keynote is of course my software of choice, though one of these days I’m...

changes to the System

It’s just not in my nature, I guess, to stick with one organizational method for very long. A few months ago, I wrote about my return to Backpack. Well, it only took about two weeks for me to leave Backpack again. There were a couple of reasons. First, I realized that while Backpack works well for me on my Mac — aside from some...

I resemble that remark

Keith Gessen: I want to move us into life choices. Does anybody regret the profession they have chosen? Mark Greif: I have no profession. Whatever profession I do, I regret it. Benjamin Kunkel: What do you . . . mean? What are you talking about? Mark Greif: I regret it! Benjamin Kunkel: What? Mark Greif: Whatever it is that I’ve...