Imaginationland
Andrew Sullivan in 2007: The longer this war goes on and the more we find out, the following scenario seems to me to be the best provisional explanation for a lot of what our secret, unaccountable,...
View ArticleHard Ideas in Hardcover
Peter J. Dougherty, "A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing" - from ChronicleReview.com: Books — specifically scholarly titles published by university presses and other professional publishers — retain...
View ArticleOur Minds Are Made Of Meat
Jonah Lehrer on "Emotional Perception": From its inception in the mid-1950's, the cognitive revolution was guided by a single metaphor: the mind is like a computer. We are a set of software programs...
View ArticleThe Great Sewing Machine of Memory
Scott Horton, "Proust—Memory and the Foods of Childhood" (Harper's Magazine): The image of Proust’s madeleine, a spongy almond-flavored cookie baked in a press to look like a scallop shell, a delight...
View ArticlePaper Without Books
From Libraries of the Future (1965):As a medium for the display of information, the printed page is superb. It affords enough resolution to meet the eye's demand. It presents enough information to...
View ArticleFoucault, Iran, 1978
Michel Foucault, "What Are The Iranians Dreaming Of?"The situation in Iran can be understood as a great joust under traditional emblems, those of the king and the saint, the armed ruler and the...
View ArticleGreen and Saffron
George Packer on why Iran's nascent revolution may be different from Burma's stillborn 2007 protests: For a few days, Burmese citizens with cell-phones (rare and expensive in Burma), modems...
View ArticleVirginia Woolf's Collected Essays
Claire Harman in the TLS: It is a surprise to discover, from Stuart Clarke’s excellent notes, how hard Woolf worked on these seemingly effortless pieces for the New York Herald Tribune, the Yale Review...
View ArticleMoney, Philosophy, and Tragedy in Ancient Greece
The Greeks and money by Richard Seaford in the TLS: This new and revolutionary phenomenon of money itself underpinned and stimulated two great inventions in the Greek polis of the sixth century,...
View ArticleThe Map Is Not The Territory
Tim O'Reilly gives an interview on the relevance of classical education to digital humanism: The unconscious often knows more than the conscious mind. I believe this is behind what Socrates referred to...
View ArticleProject Girl Wonder
Henry Jenkins interviews Mary Borsellino about Project Girl Wonder and her book Girl and Boy Wonders: Robin in Cultural Context: The idea of Stephanie Brown as Robin was so fresh and strange as a...
View ArticleOne Hundred and Forty-One Years of the Typewriter
[I especially like the shout-out to linotype.] June 23, 1868: Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap … Ding! | This Day In Tech | Wired.com: Christopher Latham Sholes’ machine was not the first typewriter. It wasn’t...
View ArticleA Gesellschaft of Angestellten
The Importance of Order: German Researchers Tackle Untidy Desks, from Der Spiegel Online: It's the same problem everywhere: Overloaded desks aren't just frustrating for their owners -- they also make...
View ArticleThe Kindle and the Jewish Question
Chava Willig Levy,The Kindle and the Jewish Question: Like my father and the Jewish doctoral student, a Chasidic master living at the turn of the 20th century looked at the world around him with an eye...
View ArticleThe Boom and Bust of Asian Cinema in the U.S.
Andrew O'Hehir interviews Grady Hendrix at the New York Asian Film Festival : "You have acquisitions people picking up movies that aren't very good," he says, "and releasing them to an audience that...
View ArticleUniversity of Chicago / Your Mom
Andrea Walker, "Chicago, Where Fun Comes to Die": The U. of C. is known for serious thinking combined with a sarcastic, self-deprecating sense of humor that always amused me when displayed on...
View ArticleWhy Michael Jackson's Death Feels Different
Josh Marshall: I think it's because so much of Michael Jackson's life seemed like make believe. Sometimes farcical. But always like play acting, somehow. So much theatrics. So many costumes. And on...
View ArticleIssac Hayes And His Marvelous Scalp
Pitchfork:Think about how crazy this is for a moment: Stax loses Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays to a plane crash and the rights to their back catalog (and, later, Sam & Dave) to Atlantic. Without...
View ArticleErving Is Always On
Miriam Burstein: Many years ago, I heard a sociologist tell an anecdote about being the only undergraduate at a faculty party. After a short while, he realized that somebody was watching him from a...
View ArticleHallucinating Sovereignty
Chris Bray: In the first volume of his biography of Andrew Jackson, Robert Remini neatly captures the strangeness of state sovereignty. It happens in a single quiet paragraph that describes the...
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The Ripped Veneer Of Inhumanity
For Andrew Sullivan, AIDS explains why 1990 was the year American attitudes towards gays changed: Remember: most of these deaths were of young men. If you think that the Vietnam war took around 60,000...
View ArticleThe New Liberal Arts: Photography
New Liberal Arts, a Snarkmarket/Revelator collaboration, is available for sale today. It's 80pp and costs $8.95. Robin reports that after five hours, half of the initial print run of 200 copies has...
View ArticleOur Neanderthal Neighbors
Svante Pääbo, "Mapping the Neanderthal Genome":One thing that we're beginning to see is that we are extremely closely related to the Neanderthals. They're our relatives. In a way, they're like a human...
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My 30th Birthday Present
Greetings, longtime readers of Short Schrift. I hope that all of you have been following my shenanigans over at Snarkmarket, which consumes most of my blogly energy. For a little while, I was using...
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