March 2009
February 2009
“There are certain types of sites for which comments work well. Metafilter is...”
– Alex Payne
Science and the Theft of the Humanities >>... →
while humanistic scholars have been presuming core facts about human nature, human capacities and human being, scientists have been getting to work. One of the most striking features of contemporary…
“The entity we call Amazon has become a finely-honed machine for taking your...”
– Steven Frank
I'm counting you out →
I love the book2 site, but this idea? — not so much. Not at all. In fact, I hate the very notion. I can’t imagine too many things more inimical to genuine reading than obsessively tracking the…
the return of the repressed →
Yes, I tried to forget about Text Patterns — tried to pretend it had never happened, tried to move on to “fresh fields and pastures new,” as the poet once wrote. But darn it, this thing is in my…
Simon Armitage, "The Shout"
We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face
I don’t remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth,
I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.
He called from over the park — I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,
from the...
Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour,... →
Now for the good news: It doesn’t cost much to write a novel (I should know, I write ‘em). And it doesn’t cost much to produce one — getting cheaper every day, thanks to low-cost, computerized setup…
Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains | Wired... →
While there is still debate among attention scientists, most now conclude that there are three types of attention. The first is orienting — the flashlight of your mind. In the case of visual…
Higher education needs a national computing cloud →
I propose you create a government-funded computing cloud for use by all colleges and universities. Such a resource would level the academic playing field. Researchers toiling at thousands of smaller…
In Defense of Readers →
What each of these readers has in common is an ability to create solitude under circumstances that would seem to prohibit it. Reading is a necessarily solitary experience—like dying, everyone reads…
thedigitalist.net » my tee oh see →
What surprises me though, is that ebooks seem to still be tethered, in general discourse, to the print book. Ebook = electronic replica of print book. This is the baseline, surely, not the endpoint….
“But if the patrons were not in themselves ridiculous, one wouldn’t be able...”
– Rameau’s Nephew (Diderot), defending snark ca. 1770. Via Caleb Crain.
“In the past few months, we’ve been riveted and disgusted by the exploits...”
– Daniel Gross
“There are times in the quarter of a century since I arrived in America that I...”
– Andrew Sullivan
“The philosophical problem of religious advocacy in a democracy is based on the...”
– David Novak
WatchLouis C. K. on Conan O’Brien (via the Technium)
“Socialismo o Muerte. Socialism or Death. In that slogan splashed across Cuba,...”
– Lygia Navarro in the VQR
me on Do-It-Yourself Tradition →
“The import and adaptation of American-style liberal arts education does in fact...”
– here
“‘In postwar Japan, the economy wasn’t doing so great, so you couldn’t get...”
– NYT
“If we can create new molecules which can behave in life-like way, we may then go...”
– Here. At last, we know why God created graduate students.
me on Fish and Millman →
A New Day for Intellectuals :: Andrew Delbanco ::... →
Can we say, with Hofstadter, that “of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged,” it is intellectuals who have “shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of…
“There is much current neuroscientific excitement about the presence in the human...”
– Steven Rose, here
“When you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to...”
– P. G. Wodehouse, Summer Lightning
“We need to think here broadly about the necessity of growth in modern society....”
– Patrick Deneen
Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About... →
I know perfectly well that because we do live in a technological age, we have some special problems that Jesus, Hillel, Socrates, and Micah did not and could not speak of. I do not have the wisdom to…
“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade. What else is there...”
– Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland, here. Posted without comment.
Michael Bérubé :: Diversity and dangerality →
Complaining about the preponderance of liberals and leftists in the arts and humanities and social sciences has so far allowed the right to dodge the question of how many young conservatives are…
“We’ve all heard the argument repeated by pundits and politicians in the...”
– here
“One may be tired of the world — tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers,...”
– Harold Brodkey, just before his death in 1996
The Spiritual In Art :: Jed Perl →
The engagement with religious themes in Rouault and Chagall, sometimes dismissed as a holdover from nineteenth-century sentimentality, might more accurately be described as a rejection of the modern…
“What is most intriguing - and, to their detractors, infuriating - about U2 is...”
– Sean O’Hagan, in a long and fascinating article
“On behalf of black people across this nation, I would like to say to our white...”
– yeah
“So I’ll just ask, yet again, how a league that claims to represent...”
– Brian Phillips on the stupidity of the Premier League
“In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil — no lyric ever stopped a tank. In...”
– Seamus Heaney
“In Wells Cathedral there’s this ancient clock,
three parts time machine,...”
– Simon Armitage, from “Poetry”; his most recent collection is reviewed here
first drafts of the parables of Jesus
Jesus said, “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man...
“But then came Copernicus and the scientific world view, and it turned out that...”
– Jerry Fodor 