2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

scritic on reading habits

Reflections on Cog Sci: How we read (articles and magazines) now: “In this post, I want to compare the two modes of reading: how we read before the internet and how we read now. I will be limiting the analysis only to news articles and magazines since I believe, pace Nicholas Carr, that it isn’t still clear how the internet...

dragged back into the maw of the Beast

I think I’m re-Googled. My escape attempt has, I fear, failed. Mail is the main issue. Fastmail is a fine email service, but I need more email organizational-fu than I can get via their web interface. That means using Apple Mail, tricked out with some plugins . . . but Mail is, frankly, a mess of an application. It has never worked...

the dichotomy

Clay Shirky: There are two principal effects of the Internet on privacy. The first is to shrink personal expression to a dichotomy: public or private. Prior to the rise of digital social life, much of what we said and did was in a public environment — on the street, in a park, at a party — but was not actually public, in the sense of...

I can’t improve on these statements

Chadwick Matlin: The purgatory scenes are a symptom of what, in retrospect, was Lost‘s greatest flaw. It refused to follow its own advice and let dead be dead. In the early seasons, Lost prided itself on its willingness to kill off any character it wanted. This, we were told, was proof that on the island the stakes were high. But...

thesis for disputation

“There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.” — W. H. Auden, 1932.

cars are bad

Chuck Klosterman: “I think that most technology is positive in the short term, and negative in the long term. I wonder, if somebody looked back at the 20th and 21st centuries a thousand years from now, what their perception of the car would be. Or of television. I wonder if over time, they’ll be seen as this thing that drove the...

Thoughts on DIY U

Dean Dad: “If you’re serious about education for the non-elite, you need institutions. The institutions need to be accountable, and open to creativity, and efficient, and changed in a host of ways that I spend most of my waking hours obsessing over and probably more that I’ve never even thought of. But you need them....

What’s the best poetry to learn by heart?

Alison Flood: I am in genuine awe of John Basinger, who has learned the whole of Paradise Lost by heart – all 12 books, 10,565 lines and 60,000-odd words. He completed his feat in 2001 and can still recite it today; his achievement is so astonishing that the journal Memory recently conducted a study on him. Testing Basinger by giving...

only connect!

Shreeharsh Kelkar has emailed with some questions that I thought it might be interesting to answer here. Here are the first two: 1) Just briefly, how do you decide if something is worthwhile (“clippable”) while browsing the web? Obviously, the easiest is when it relates to a particular project you’re doing. But what...