2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

Steven Johnson and the connected mind

Folks, I’m still way busy, so posting will continue to be light for a while. I’m hoping at some point to have substantive responses to Steven Johnson’s new book Where Good Ideas Come From, which I read last week. For now, check out Jason B. Jones’s review, and consider one important question, which will take me a while to...

unpopular highlights

Virginia Heffernan: Amazon is quick to point out that you can always disable the [Popular Highlights] feature. But there’s a genie-in-the-bottle problem here. As with many things on the Web, once you’ve glimpsed popular highlights, it’s hard to unglimpse them. You get curious about what other readers think, especially with a book...

and while I’m being grumpy

Let’s fact-check our meditations on the past and future of reading, okay? No one knows where all this will end up, but it will be nowhere near as revolutionary as the change from reading scrolls to reading books in the middle ages. The e-reader revolution merely lures the same people to read books in a different format. The move from...

Enough! or, Too much!

Kevin Kelly: Today some 4.5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives. Words have migrated from wood pulp to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards and tablets. Letters are no longer fixed in black ink on paper, but flitter on a glass surface in a rainbow of colors as fast as our eyes can blink....

charting Harry

charting Harry

J. K. Rowling’s plan for key events in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. More information here. Via my indefatigable editor, Adam Keiper. So cool.

a brief, random thought

This week, as I’m helping my students get their first major projects written, and dealing — I am long expert in this — dealing with their anxiousness to please, their dutifulness, their fears of putting a foot wrong, their very strong desire to know exactly what needs to be done to gain both informal and formal approval, I am...

work in progress

Dear readers, there will be little activity around here this week — I’ve got way too much on my plate and not enough time to accomplish it. A shame, because I’ve been reading some stuff lately I really want to blog about. But even on the internet, late is better than never. I’ll still be tweeting from time to time,...

stock overflow

Here’s a post by Peter Osnos on a book about Russian state security in the post-KGB era called The New Nobility: PublicAffairs printed 8,010 copies of the book, and to date has shipped 4,964. The total sales in the first two weeks, according to our tracking report, are 304 copies. Most brick and mortar stores — the major chains and...

first and last

Martyn Lyons, from an essay on “New Readers in the NIneteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers”: By the 1890s, 90 per cent literacy had been almost uniformly reached [in the Western world], and the old discrepancy between men and women had disappeared. This was the ‘golden age’ of the book in the West: the first...

learning Greek

Sure, people think it’s a good idea to learn Greek. But of course they would when you put the question that way. It’s a good idea to learn all sorts of things. The problems come when you try to determine relative goods. Is learning ancient Greek more valuable than learning calculus?For the last few years I’ve made a...