As one whose shelves were once littered with not-reading, I liked this. From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “The history of reading,” [Leah] Price says, “really has to encompass the history of not reading.” Anyone who has ever displayed a trophy volume on the coffee table knows that people do many things with books besides read them. A book can be deployed as a sign of intellectual standing or aspiration. It can be used to erect a social barrier between... Read more
Kate Donovan, who is a real blessing to the interwebs, makes a great point about the Deep Rifts in the skepto-atheosphere, which I will then pour a teaspoon of cold water on. Kate writes: . . . if we’re going to be intellectually honest, we DO need to be arguing, critiquing, and otherwise speaking up about intolerable behavior. We need to–to cherrypick from the Bible myself–cast the beams from our own eyes. Stepping out and saying that you don’t want... Read more
Oh, barf. Okay, so apparently that Thunderf00t guy (who I didn’t know anything about before the tumult he brought to FtB) has a video in which my name appears among a list of folks who contributed to the Skepchick series on rejecting anti-woman vitriol in the skepto-atheosphere, and asserts that the aforementioned folks were all “bullied” or “cajoled” into taking part. I mean come the fuck on. Do I really have to do this? For the record: I was honored... Read more
Catherine Bracy on the tech sector’s obliviousness to genuine social causes and crises: The well-documented lack of diversity in the Valley would be comical if it wasn’t so harmful. It feels like, and often is, a bunch of Stanford guys making tools to fix their own problems. . . Barely any of them start from an entrenched social problem and work backwards from there. Very few of them are really fundamentally improving society. . . They really don’t care that... Read more
When I read this piece by Louis Michael Seidman in the New York Times today, I wanted to throw a parade. Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago. Oh snap! This is the kind of thing Good Americans... Read more
The Economist has a very worthwhile exploration of the enduring concept of Hell, but concludes in such a way as to baffle me. [Hell] should have been sunk long ago by the weight of its contradictions. But the key to its survival lies in the writings of St Augustine, who, of all people, ought to have been tolerant of sinners: to paraphrase, “Knowledge of the torments of the damned is part of heavenly bliss.” St Bernardino of Siena took it... Read more
Jaron Lanier, a kind of web reverse-guru, perhaps the Anti-Shirky, talks to Smithsonian magazine about what he sees as the existential threat of Internet anonymity. “This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.” “Social lasers of cruelty?” I repeat. “I just made that up,” Lanier says. “Where everybody coheres into this cruelty beam….Look what we’re setting up here in the world... Read more
A new Pew report with all sorts of nifty data on tablets and e-reading suggests that the sales of dedicated e-readers themselves, like Kindles and Nooks, have stalled, and may be headed downward. I think this is interesting, because the common view seems to be that this is due to the popularity and overall utility of tablets (like the iPad and Kindle Fire) obviating the need for reading-specific devices. But I suspect that it's because the market for e-readers, and... Read more
An article at Ars Technica asks an interesting question: why is DRM still tolerated on e-books when it’s been killed in regards to music? The reasons given boil down to two things: with the ubiquity of cross-platform apps like Amazon’s Kindle app, folks can already read their DRM-locked books on multiple devices, whereas for music there was a real consumer demand for this kind of freedom. Also, there’s no remix culture to speak of with books like there is with... Read more
This is how politics and advocacy is done on the right. Unlike progressive or reality-based groups who snipe behind each other’s backs, arguing about policy or tactics, or scramble for precious-yet-overlapping sources of income and attention, the conservative movement just brings guns. Via WaPo: [Dick Armey] walked into the [FreedomWorks’] Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The... Read more
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