imagined interlocutors

James Sturm’s experiment continues.

bodies and minds revisited

Scott Adams: My wife and I designed our new house as a brain supplement, although we never spoke of it in those words. Every element of the home is designed to reprogram the brains that enter it to feel relaxed in some of its spaces and inspired in others. The language I used at the time of the design was that every space should be an...

art of letters

WPA posters, via Typography.com.

Peak Book

Will Self: The above leads me to suspect that we indeed may have passed that numinous — but for all that, real — point known as “peak book”. Might this mean that the ever-expanding and ever-deranging gap between what is written and what is read may be beginning to narrow at last? Don’t be ridiculous! The web has put...

creation and consumption

From Megan Garber’s largely positive, thoughtful review of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: But the problem with TV, in this framing, is its very teeveeness; the villain is the medium itself. The differences in value between, say, The Wire and Wipeout, here, don’t much matter — both are TV shows, and that’s what defines them....

The Long Ships

Oh, how I love commendations of neglected or forgotten books. Michael Chabon beautifully praises one called The Long Ships. Whose fault is it that this book is unknown? The fault, therefore, must lie with the world, which as any reader of The Long Ships could tell you, buries its treasures, despises its glories, and seeks contentment...

too much research

I couldn’t agree more with this call to reduce the amount of published academic research. Too much of what is published is of poor quality, and most published research is ignored by the scholars’ peers. (We can only hope that it’s the poor quality work that’s being ignored.) All of us in academia have colleagues...

catacombs

“A spotlight illuminates the icon of the Apostle John discovered with other paintings in a catacomb located under a modern office building in a residential neighborhood of Rome, Tuesday, June, 22, 2010. Restorers said Tuesday they had unearthed the 4th-century images using a new laser technique that allowed them to burn off centuries...

’nuff said

paywalls vs. ?

Jeff Jarvis is contemptuous of Rupert Murdoch’s decision to charge for online access to his newspapers and magazines. I think that it’s hard to imagine paywalls working, but what should Murdoch do? Oddly, Jarvis makes not one recommendation. If paywalls are so obviously misbegotten, what are the alternatives? Perhaps if there...