January 2012
“A doctor treating many of the students is confident that they are suffering not...”
– Mass Hysteria in Upstate New York. The Victorian era returns!
“Google’s new business tactics are creatively inelegant, and insupportable to...”
– World Wide Webs. Sounds alarmist, but I’m a bit worried that this could happen.
“Nobody is forcing anybody who is uncomfortable with the terms of service to use...”
– Consent of the Networked: How Google, Facebook, and other cyberspace powerhouses handle digital power. - Slate Magazine. Maybe. But maybe Facebook is just the obvious way to connect with people. Sometimes, when a company (Facebook, Google, Apple, whatever) takes a my-way-or-the-highway approach,...
“As the laureate says, poetry is condensed. Text is not condensed, it is...”
– Geoffrey Hill
“Indeed, it may be that the question, “what is an algorithm?” is the wrong one to...”
– What is an Algorithm? - The Late Age of Print
“Over the course of 16 years, researchers have developed a rich dataset related...”
– Digitizing the Past to Protect and Preserve History | Behind the Scenes | LiveScience
“In other words, contemporary liberalism offers religious groups a choice. They...”
– Religious Giving and Its Critics - NYTimes.com
On (Not) Learning to Code →
My newest post for the Atlantic Tech channel
“I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don’t anymore. That’s not to say I...”
– Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Why publishers should give away ebooks
“Nadal, though? He plays like he’s fighting giants. It’s not just the...”
– The epic warfare of the Rafael Nadal-Novak Djokovic Australian Open final - Grantland. I love sport, as the Brits call it, but I’m not sure that sport deserves a writer as good as Brian.
“Such people are strictly amateur compared to, say, Harold Williams, a New...”
– Graeme Wood (via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)
“But what if you could re-define books’ value proposition? What if...”
– The Future of the Book Is the Stream - Megan Garber - Technology - The Atlantic
“Religious ideas are usually said to be an argument against what is called...”
– The conclusion of Paul Berman’s long, brilliant essay on Václav Havel in The New Republic — full text available only to subscribers, alas. This is the kind of thing TNR does best; I wish it did more along these lines.
“‘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 