Lanierisms

I have more to report on Pacific Standard Time but a channel change seems like a good idea right about now. So here are a few highlights from The Visionary, a portrait of Jaron Lanier by Jennifer Kahn in the New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2011. (I am particularly fond of Lanier and have […]

In and Out and Back

The Wasatch Mountains in Utah This comment from Bill Keller in the New York Times caught my eye: In “The Uncoupling,” there is a wistful passage about the high-school cohort my daughter is about to join. Wolitzer describes them this way: “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but […]

I Know Not Seems

(Image: Doug Johnson at The Blue Skunk Blog) In Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers quotes Henry David Thoreau who wrote that the man who constantly and desperately keeps going to the post office to check for correspondence from others “has not heard from himself […]

Discreteness

A watercolor by Renee Collins, from my collection. I don’t know the name that Renee originally gave it, but I’ve always referred to it as “Leaky Margins.” If you spend a fair amount of time online, you have probably come up against The Membrane. It functions a bit like a cell wall, as the boundary […]

New Media to Old

Two of my all time favorite blogs have now been transmogrified into a version of themselves as old media (i.e., books). The first was BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, compiled by my friend and master archivist, the inimitable PK from his very popular site of the same name. Published at the end of […]