This worries me a little (by Toby Litt in Granta): A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became addicted to it. This convinced me of one thing: If the computer games which exist now had existed back in 1979 I would not have read any books, I think; I would not have seen writing as an adequate entertainment; I would not have seen... Read more
Advice I could stand to take, from Rob Beschizza, editor of BoingBoing: Getting snared by technology-tweaking, especially design, is the fastest and easiest way to waste time to no good end as an indie blogger type. There’s only one thing that brings in readers, and marketing people call it “content”. Writing. Artwork. Games. Whatever it is that you do that other people care about. The confusion between the technology of blogging and the art of it is natural, because we’re still... Read more
Listening tonight to the nearly-unbearable “Retraction” edition of “This American Life” in which Mike Daisey is taken to task for his fabrication of details about his experiences in China, I kept waiting for Daisey to more effectively counter the assertion by Ira Glass that people who come to see a monologue expect that every word of it is true. Perhaps it’s because Glass and the myriad bloggers and reporters feasting on this story are themselves journalists, and therefore can’t help but expect something... Read more
The so-called post-PC revolution came to my house. This has been my first weekend off in a couple of weeks, and though I’ve been browsing the Web, tweeting, and now blogging, I didn’t even turn on my computer yesterday, and if you know me at all, you know that the only reason this could be so would be if I was hospitalized and unconscious. Look, I know. For millions of people, this is already how they live their digital lives... Read more
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to... Read more
Architecture professor Thomas De Monchaux, in a piece that has almost nothing to do with economic policy, helps to clarify thinking about the concept of austerity: Economically, austerity — which the Germans, among others, are intent on forcing upon their southern brethren — can sound like a good idea, but might actually exacerbate the conditions it ostensibly ameliorates. One day, we might look back on cuts in public services and infrastructure during a downturn with the same disbelief with which today’s doctors... Read more
Richard Holmes’ 2009 tome is aptly titled. It’s a wonder, and it takes an age to read it. Right. I wanted to get that out of the way, as the fact of its lengthiness weighs on me as I consider penning a reaction to its substance. It feels really long. But, as with many efforts, it is worth it. The Age of Wonder is an exhaustive chronicle of the Romantic era of science — indeed, the dawn of the very term. It... Read more
My mind (and sense of conscience) was blown by an article in n + 1 on the horror that is the American prison system. I won’t go into the horrifying detail, but suffice it to say that the wrongs done to small-time crooks and mere drug addicts, all with the knowledge of — and collusion with — prison authorities, are grotesque, far, far beyond the notion of “paying one’s debt to society.” As writer Christopher Glazek puts it, “Crime has not fallen in the... Read more
D.G. Myers positions reading not as an escape but as a challenge to ourselves: To read an author is to read someone different from ourselves. Reading is not a means of self-affirmation, but of self-denial. Any book that is any good challenges its readers: This is so, isn’t it? Did you know this? Have you considered that? [ … ] Hence reading is self-mastery, because the self (and its affirmations) are held in check while the author (and his structures of thought) are fully... Read more
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