January 2012
“‘Listen,’ said Bernie Krause. He rolled down his car window, and we...”
– The Sound of Silence (The quietest place in the lower forty-eight) .
Most have never heard it? What is he talking about? Here in the suburbs, and I suppose everywhere except the most concrete-dominated sections of cities, the dawn chorus goes on unabated. Around here the birds actually start well...
“When I’m at the computer I feel as if I’m plugged straight into the...”
– Joanne Harris: My desktop | Books | guardian.co.uk
“If you have read several books by Don DeLillo, sooner or later you will have a...”
– A Different Kind of Delirium by Charles Baxter | The New York Review of Books
“In a companion survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Twitter users, the...”
– How Africa Tweets
“The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business...”
– Umberto Eco
“Desperate for help [with his failing vision], Huxley was persuaded to pursue the...”
– The Doors of Perception: What did Huxley see in mescaline? | Books | guardian.co.uk
“Why are creative people so deeply sceptical of Britain’s honours system?...”
– Don’t call me Sir: why do artists snub royal honours? | Art and design | guardian.co.uk. Or maybe there’s more than one reason. In 1952 C. S. Lewis turned down a CBE, and it’s not likely that his thoughts were the same as Lucian Freud’s.
“On December 10, 1810, in a muddy field around 25 miles from London, a fight took...”
– Brian Phillips on the boxing career of freed American slave Tom Molineaux - Grantland. A powerful story, beautifully told. Brian is so, so good.
“The real question, John [of the Cross] suggests, is about what you are really...”
– Rowan Williams, “The Dark Night”
“Vladimir Putin has laid out his plans to compile a canon of 100 Russian books...”
– Vladimir Putin plans 100-book Russian canon all students must read | Books | guardian.co.uk
for anyone who might be interested. . . .
My posts at the Atlantic’s Technology Channel are listed here.
Why Is the Subtitle Font in 'Mission Impossible 4'... →
“Internet executives like Mark Zuckerberg like to argue that...”
– Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Piracy and privacy
“On March 29, 1962, the Village Voice ran a full-page ad touting the merits of...”
– Paris Review – Mistaken Identity, Jenny Hendrix
“Television is a very different experience in the age of video on demand. Even if...”
– Great piece by Tim Carmody
“The home schooling movement, by contrast, has no access to funding nor any...”
– Noah Millman » Textbook Cases
“Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes: —
(1) Books to...”
– Oscar Wilde, “To Read or Not to Read” (1886)
“• Those that belong to the emperor
• Embalmed ones
• Those that are trained
•...”
– Categories to which beasts belong, from Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1942)
Richard Wilbur, "To the Etruscan Poets"
Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mother’s milk the mother tongue,
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind
Like still fresh tracks across a field of snow,
Not reckoning that all could melt and go.
“The Giants’ win over the 49ers in a magnificent throwback conference...”
– Did Giants Strategically Concuss Kyle Williams? — The Sports Section
“Justice Sonia Sotomayor then writes, agreeing with Scalia’s trespass approach,...”
– U.S. v. Jones: Supreme Court Justices Alito and Scalia brawl over technology and privacy. - Slate Magazine
“There have been three major changes to 21st century writing: (1) writing is more...”
– New Rules: Writing Well In The 21st Century | A.T. | Cleveland
“Blogging demonstrates the persistence of a key truth in the history of reading,...”
– Caleb McDaniel
“In the early 19th century Lord Byron was the most-quoted author, the most...”
– Warren Ellis » GUEST INFORMANT: Jess Nevins. Read all of Jess’s fascinating post, which sheds an interesting light on the issues I raised in my first real post at the Atlantic’s Technology Channel earlier today.
“As Schiller ticked down the list, for feature after feature — portability,...”
– Matthew Battles: It doesn’t take Cupertino to make textbooks interactive » Nieman Journalism Lab
“The publishers’ dream of creating content once and having it run everywhere is...”
– A First Take on Apple’s New Education Tools « The Scholarly Kitchen
“His strong point is that religion never lost faith in using culture to improve...”
– Alain de Botton: a life in writing
“Jobs didn’t just use pseudo-asceticism for marketing. He wielded purist...”
– Jaron Lanier
“Christopher Nolan views anarchy with dread, and human behavior in the absence of...”
– Taylor Marvin
“Now both individual authors and trade and textbook presses can be drawn into a...”
– Tim Carmody
“What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions...”
– Tim Maudlin
“The book as such isn’t obsolete; inherently, it’s less immediate and raw, going...”
– “Saving My Life,” by David Shields | Little Star Journal
Czeslaw Milosz, from "From the Rising of the Sun"
My generation was lost. Cities too. And nations.
But all this a little later. Meanwhile, in the window, a swallow
Performs its rite of the second. That boy, does he already suspect
That beauty is always elsewhere and always delusive?
Now he sees his homeland. At the time of the second mowing.
Roads winding uphill and down. Pine groves. Lakes.
An overcast sky with one slanting ray.
And...
“There are two reasons, basically, why soccer lends itself to spectatorial...”
– Brian Phillips on soccer and boredom - Grantland
“I doubt that humility is among the first traits most people think of when they...”
– Women in the Academy & Professions: What I Wish My Pastor Knew About… The Life of a Scientist - InterVarsity.org
“The system the judges upheld had its roots in feudalism. Edward I, one of...”
– You Can’t Read This Book: why libel tourists love London | Law | The Observer
“These are the kinds of issues publishers of electronic textbooks have to...”
– Tim Carmody
“Stressing out too much about opposition often leads you to miss out on allies...”
– Tim Burke
“When you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to...”
– P. G. Wodehouse, Summer Lightning
Reverting to Type: a Reader's Story
Since the publication of my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a number of people have asked me about my history as a reader: what I read when I was younger, how my reading shaped my own development, and so on. They are sometimes surprised to learn that almost all of my reading, before my college years, involved science (especially astronomy) and science fiction. In...
“When [Graham] Greene died, his heirs and trustees were faced with the conundrum...”
– On margins | Robert McCrum | Books | guardian.co.uk