May 2010
The Mongoliad →
Now here’s a really interesting idea — from Neal Stephenson and others — for a book … or rather an app … or a service … sort of a wiki or a game … oh heck, just read it:
The…
why aren't you more emphatic about my lack of... →
Psychology Today:
College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new meta-analysis presented to at the…
the problem of abundance →
The Quintessence of Ham:
Roger Chartier identifies eighteenth-century concerns about scarcity and abundance which closely parallel the challenges faced by digitial humanists. For example, he…
reforming the humanities PhD →
Views: A New Humanities Ph.D. - Inside Higher Ed:
Humanities education needs to do more than change the shape of the dissertation, legitimate non-academic jobs, or validate academic jobs that…
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…
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 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,…
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….
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…
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…
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…
goblins →
(here)
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…
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…
simpler = privater? →
Technology Review: “On stage this morning at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Facebook vice president of product, Chris Cox, promised ‘drastically simplified’ privacy controls, which should be…
update
It occurs to me that my Text Patterns posts will continue to show up here; I don’t see any reason to stop doing that, especially since there will be more of them now.
permanent vacation
Folks, this tumblelog has been on hiatus before, but this time I think it’ll be permanent. I’ve noticed lately that I spend too much time trying to decide whether a particular link should be posted here or on Text Patterns or on Twitter — which means, I think, that something is redundant. I just don’t need that many venues for my “thoughts.” So from now on,...
“Now 95 years old, Ted Kheel has been trying to improve New York’s traffic for...”
– The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic | Magazine
“All this points to the nature of every real story. It contains, openly or...”
– Walter Benjamin, from “The Storyteller”
“The World Cup in South Africa is on the brink of chaos. Transport and...”
– Musical Chairs « LRB blog
London letters →
In March my friend Brett Foster and I spent a few days in London (joined briefly by actor, director, theatrical impresario, and boon companion Mark Lewis) and, in Heathrow awaiting our return…
more on sharing and oversharing →
Tim O’Reilly takes a line similar to that of Steven Johnson:
The essence of my argument is that there’s enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be…
“I actually want to write a treatise in defence of pretension… . I think...”
– James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. This is going in my book.
"neglected"? "masterpiece"? →
Robert McCrum lists a few “neglected masterpieces,” among them, oddly, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Or perhaps not oddly: perhaps this is just an…
altruistic oversharing →
Steven Johnson writes:
In our house, we have had health issues … that we have chosen not to bring to the public sphere of the valley. We have kept them private not because we’re embarrassed…
“The official name of Facebook in China, as it appears on the Chinese version of...”
– Language Log » Facebook Absolutely Must Die
in the shallows →
I will have more to say about all this at some later point, but for now let me refer you all to Russell Arben Fox’s excellent response to Nick Carr’s forthcoming book The Shallows:
The book’s…
“Few Christians will want to discount all religious experiences as mere...”
– Are You Experienced? | Books and Culture
“ Honesty: Tell the truth. Don’t make our information public against our...”
– We, the users - Facebook users’ Bill of Rights
admonitory image →
Via Margaret Soltan the story of a Russian controversy: images from the fiction of Dostoevsky in the Moscow subway. People seem to be particularly freaked out by the image above.
The …
“The God who has, it seems, been vanquished, is yet a God who cannot be...”
– Rowan Williams - the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon to commemorate Carthusian Martyrs
the broken system of grading →
Cathy Davidson, a professor of English at Duke, announced last year that for one of her classes, “Your Brain on the Internet” — yes, that’s an English class — she would outsource the grading to…
“There’s something in the UK called the Campaign for Real Ale. It was...”
– Cannes #7: A campaign for Real Movies - Roger Ebert’s Journal
“A new study indicates that human generosity may have a limit, even when being...”
– There are no truly good men, according to cooperation study
“I don’t expect Emily Howell [David Cope’s music-composition program]...”
– Will human composers soon be obsolete? - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine
Facing Facebook lock-in →
A long time ago (in internet terms anyway) I explained why I was an early adopter and then an early abandoner of Facebook. Given the path Facebook has followed in its treatment of its users — …
“‘Information wants to be free’ has the same relationship to the...”
– a great summary from Cory Doctorow
poor academic tools →
This is not surprising:
The Kindle isn’t doing as well in academic environments as Amazon—and educators—had originally hoped. The Darden Business School at the University of Virginia is near the…
“Perhaps no word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime...”
– Bill Bryson: the history of the toilet | Life and style | The Guardian
“Books have dominated my life. At the age of three I entered a dialogue with TS...”
– John Crace channels Christopher Hitchens
bleg! →
Gracious readers, I need some help. I have a vast compendium of stories and quotes about reading that I’m drawing on for my book, but there is one story I can’t find — I may not have saved it. And…
getting off on the wrong foot →
Brandon Sanderson’s novel Mistborn: the Final Empire begins with a brief italicized passage, spoken by the protagonist, which contains this sentence: “They say I will hold the future of the…
“‘It is true that we need more nanosurgeons than we did 10 to 15 years...”
– Plan B - Skip College - NYTimes.com 