2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

all that said . . .

. . . aren’t we debating all kinds of really fascinating things these days? In that sense, and in many others, it’s a great time to be alive. As someone who grew up torn between an interest in science — throughout my childhood I was sure I would grow up to be an astronomer and when I started college I was still pretty sure...

sentenced to read

Come on, I’m an English professor, you think I’m not going to link to this? Rouse is one of thousands of offenders across the US who, as an alternative to prison, are placed on a rehabilitation programme called Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL). Repeat offenders of serious crimes such as armed robbery, assault or drug dealing...

last round with Shirky

So to get to the heart of the matter that I’ve been discussing in the previous two posts: I doubt that Clay Shirky writes lolcat captions. It would be a waste of his time, wouldn’t it? He has better things to do, doesn’t he? After all, as his Wikipedia bio shows, this is a guy who has spent his whole adult life in...

Shirky and me, continued

So, again, how do those exciting autobiographical revelations from my last post relate to Clay Shirky’s ideas about cognitive surplus? Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. . . .So Shirky’s key idea — which is expressed fully enough in a talk he gave in 2008; the new book doesn’t add all that much, as far as I...

Shirky and me

My suspicions of Clay Shirky’s techno-optimism — detailed in several recent posts on this blog — have a genuine intellectual foundation, but I’m also aware that Shirky’s arguments annoy me more than they ought to. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s bugging me, and I think I may have isolated it. Bear with me while I...

man in an iFugue

Gary Shteyngart: “This right here,” said the curly-haired, 20-something Apple Store glam-nerd who sold me my latest iPhone, “is the most important purchase you will ever make in your life.” He looked at me, trying to gauge whether the holiness of this moment had registered as he passed me the Eucharist with two firm, unblemished...

Wayfaring

Wayfaring

My new collection, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant, is now available. Get ’em while they’re hot! (Because, you know, what’s hotter than a collection of literary-cultural-theological essays? I sure can’t think of anything.)

slow reading

I hate it when this happens: I recently sent off the O-Lord-I-hope-it’s-finished manuscript of my book on reading to Cynthia Read, my editor at Oxford UP, and just today, in reading this excellent article by Patrick Kingsley, I found several links to books and articles that I did not know about but wish I had. My book has a whole...

the bookshelf as memory theater

From a wonderful essay by Nathan Schneider: What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people...