From an initial gathering with Regent students during our airport pickup to question and answer sessions and hallway conversations, there was a consistent theme: how to navigate apparent conflict between modern biblical scholarship and classic spiritual exegesis. Although any school has its unique features, the challenge faced by these Regent students has become fairly typical at a number of evangelical institutions. Courses in biblical studies and (usually) hermeneutics teach how to exegete the Bible using modern tools of critical scholarship, perhaps with a measure of discernment about the presuppositions involved in the history of those tools. Meanwhile courses in theology and (perhaps) pastoral ministry or spiritual life teach what classic churchly interpreters did with the Bible and suggest (to varying degrees) that we should go and do likewise. The challenge of discernment becomes much more difficult as a result: can the students embrace a modern approach centered on historical reconstruction of the human author's intentions, simply making minor presuppositional adjustments that uphold the Bible's historical value and theological authority? Or must students fundamentally embrace a more classic understanding of spiritual exegesis centered on pursuit of the divine Author's intentions, simply making ad hoc use of modern historical tools when these seem helpful to churchly aims?

A “conservative” – concerned, as Will must surely be, with unintended (and even intended) consequences – would want to inquire whether there were some connection between these various phenomena. Might some of the consequences of the mobility and power that expansive consumption of fossil fuels have engendered include the exacerbation of a number of baleful social trends, many of which result from the gas-addled belief in human mastery, control, and autonomy, as well as attendant instability and societal transformation? Might the very growth and expansion of government have something to do with the national and global expansion of commerce that our fuel has fueled, the penetration of a global capital market into every town and hamlet in the world, the inescapable “interconnection” between every human on the globe (and, our attendant global vulnerability), and which in turn fostered a system that demanded an active government to foster, support, and maintain?

Now that we have passed throughout the uncanny valley, and audiences will accept totally synthetic actors, filmmakers will begin to explore the limits of the hyperreal. Yes, we'll have more realistic aliens and alien environments in science fiction films, but we'll also have hyperreal suburbs and hyperreal urban cities with hyper real ordinary people in the present tense. I'm expecting that for the next ten years or so, directors will create more and greater hyperreal films, until we tire of it (like we have with hyperreal high dynamic range still photography). And then we'll see shaky, gritty, unfocused, hand held camcorder type totally synthetic worlds as well. And every variety of in-between hybrid worlds. {NB: This is overlooking the matter of *sound*: we won't have "totally synthetic actors" anytime soon, because we need real people to do the voices.]

Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won't be able to fight on without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on -- we have a organizations that fight for them -- EFF, Bits of Freedom, EDRi, CCC, Netzpolitik, La Quadrature du Net, and all the others, who are thankfully, too numerous to name here -- we may yet win the battle, and secure the ammunition we'll need for the war.

This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then “zero-carbon” is the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing the stuff out. It needs to do this quickly, and by any means necessary. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate the power we “need” without producing greenhouse gases, and there will be no need to ever turn the lights off; no need to ever slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet’s ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful, and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places that environmentalism came into being to protect.

And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonized by vast “solar arrays,” glass and steel and aluminum, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires. The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges and hundreds of wave machines strung around the coastlines like Victorian necklaces. The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages. The croplands and even the rainforests, the richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt-free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses of Europe and America.

What the paper shows is that the characteristics that teachers use to describe their favorite student correlate negatively with the characteristics associated with creativity. In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like.  (FYI, the research design would have been stronger if the researchers had actually tested the students for creativity.)  As a result, schooling has a negative effect on creativity.

My experience as a parent is consistent with the idea that teachers don’t like creative students but I try not to blame the teachers too much. Creative people, for better and worse, ignore social conventions. Thus, it can be hard for teachers to deal with creative students in a classroom setting where they must guide 20-30 students en masse.

And his summary of a half decade of policy papers on that subject in his book is a warning to the technological optimists, at least he says it is, about the nature of the net delusion, that the net brings freedom. I am, I guess, one of the technological optimists, because I do believe that the net brings freedom. I don’t think Mr. Morozov is wrong, however. The wrong net brings tyranny and the right net brings freedom, this is a version of the reason why I still have the buttons for distribution that say “Stallman was right.” The right net brings freedom and the wrong net brings tyranny because it all depends on how the code works.

But as far as Notational Velocity goes, I can at least talk about which major problems I’m planning on solving. In the short term, I’ll integrate and refine the most useful features from current and upcoming “forks”, as well as finish up the most important existing feature requests. In the medium term, I hope to have a means of both maintaining the same set of notes in several places without losing any information and without needing to trust system administrators of so-called “cloud” services, as well as accessing those notes on Linux hosts natively and securely. In the long-term, I’d like to apply that solution to the emerging field of “cloud”-based services in general, which (save for a few like Dropbox) are a massive step backward in terms of user-control, privacy, and OS-integration, from what the Internet used to be 20 years ago. And more speculatively, I think NV could be succeeded by an application with even greater flexibility, simplicity, and adherence to those metrics that Jef Raskin championed. Such an application would work a bit differently, perhaps constituting a kind of infinitely associative n-dimensional text-editor.

In short, although they don’t understand the impulse to grieve on Facebook, most trolls aren’t gunning for people experiencing “authentic” grief online (that there is such a thing as “authentic” grief is a major assumption on the trolls’ part, but is treated as a given). Rather, the vast majority of trolls’ RIP energies are directed at so–called “grief tourists,” users who have no real–life connection to the victim and who, according to the trolls, could not possibly be in mourning. As far as trolls are concerned, grief tourists are shrill, disingenuous and, unlike grieving friends and families, wholly deserving targets. The much–ridiculed statement “I didn’t know you but I’m very sorry you’re dead” is therefore seen as a flashing neon declaration of trollability. “This isn’t grief,” Paulie once argued. “This is boredom and a pathological need for attention masquerading as grief.” Interestingly, trolls would often court this response just to exploit users who were stupid enough to take the bait. Paulie was a master of creating and publicizing fake (well, “fake” unbeknownst to the people who would join) RIP pages for high–profile crime victims, particularly young attractive white women. As Paulie would often insist, the utter reverence grief tourists have for cute white dead girls (“they just love them”) perfectly captures the absurdity of expressing grief via wall–post. Indeed for RIP trolls, few things were more entertaining than creating a shrine to some dead stranger, allowing the group membership to swell, then ambushing the drive-by mourners with offensive content or other shenanigans, for example by “flipping” the page from something innocuous (“RIP [insert name of dead white teenager]”) to something outrageous (“Click ‘Like’ if You Think [dead white teenager] Deserved to Be Taught a Lesson”). To the troll, this was lulz at its finest.

The great German critic Walter Benjamin has said that the task of cultural historians is to brush against the grain of cultural presuppositions. If that is the case, and I think it is in many ways, then one of the presuppositions that we should unpack is a coupling of technological innovation and human progress. We find this narrative advanced in the supposed "Facebook Revolutions" that make us feel as though we're doing more than wasting time when we log on to social media. Or, more perniciously, in our uncritical acceptance of drone attacks, which advance the fiction of technology leading to warfare producing no unwanted casualties. The sense that technology is inherently a form of progress, rather than a platform for consumerism, is one of the most insidious ideologies of our time, and one that distracts us from meditating on the true sources of human flourishing. When digital humanists claim not to be a critical movement in the traditional sense while also and simultaneously advertising new vistas of humanistic study made possible by their work, they come rather too close to that ideology for my comfort.

The kind of humanism that seems to me to be most valuable at present is that which fully disarticulates innovation and progress; which makes visible the limits of the ideology surrounding technology; which can summon several millennia of human culture from various corners of the globe; and which never stops reminding us of the spiritual and ethical, rather than material or digital, dimensions of human experience. Fish is right to suggest that throughout human history much of that kind of thinking has spoken in a religious idiom, and that it is not less thoughtful for that. The Platonic utopianism of Saint Augustine or al-Farabi prompts us to imagine an ideal human society. That is a kind of vision that no 3D smartphone can provide.

The central premise of what Joy rightly calls humanist criticism– which is nearly all existing criticism today –is that texts are primarily vehicles or carriers of meaning. As a consequence, meaning is something that is before the text in either the temporal or the transcendental sense. Meaning is that which is prior to the text such that the text is but a carrier of meaning. Like a crypt that hides what lies in rest within it, the text is thus something to be decrypted, deciphered, so as to discover its meaning. If this is necessary, then it must be because there is something of a strife between the materiality of the text, its inscription in paper and other mediums, and the meaning of the text. Meaning is always withdrawn from the surface of the text on paper (and here not in OOO’s sense of withdrawal), while it is the inscription on paper, in the most literal sense, that presents itself to the reader. If there is a strife, in this framework, within the work between meaning and the text, then this is because there is always an excess of potential meaning in the text. In the analytic setting a patient relates to me a dream in which he is joyfully frolicking with a deer in his brother’s back yard. Why this dream? The analyst notes that “deer” is a homonym for “dear”. They are both pronounced ‘dir. Perhaps the patient is in love with his brother’s wife? At the textual level, the speech of the analysand allows for a variety of different interpretations. Is the dream merely about a deer or is it really about his “dear”? The question will be decided by what is before the text or dream, by the latent content behind the manifest text.

But in my experience digital humanists are really not interested in regulating disciplinary boundaries — except insofar as they want a seat at the table. “Isn’t DH about turning the humanities into distant reading and cliometrics and so on?” I understand the suspicion, but no. I personally happen to be enthusiastic about distant reading, but DH is more diverse than that. Digital humanists approach interpretation in a lot of different ways, at different scales. Some people focus tightly on exploration of a single work. “But isn’t it in any case about displacing interpretation with a claim to empirical truth?” Absolutely not. Here I can fortunately recommend Stephen Ramsay’s recent book Reading Machines, which understands algorithms as ways of systematically deforming a text in order to enhance interpretive play. Ramsay is quite eloquent about the dangers of “scientism.”

At present, the American magazine essay, both the long feature piece and the critical essay, is flourishing, in unlikely circumstances. Despite the slightly tedious nostalgia for the world of the New York intellectuals and the patient outlets of nineteen-fifties high journalism, I doubt that Edmund Wilson or Alfred Kazin would rightfully find much to complain about. New and new-ish journals such as McSweeney’s, n+1, The Point, and The Common have found their way; older magazines have been optimistically refurbished, or just optimistically survive anyway.

There are plenty of reasons for this. One is that magazines, big and small, are taking over some of the cultural and literary ground vacated by newspapers in their seemingly unstoppable evaporation. Another is that the contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

Writers of all kinds, from the nakedly commercial to the wilfully abstruse, look for two things: love and money. The traditional publisher, to a greater or lesser extent (this is part of his/her competitive edge) provides this. As the Hachette memo states, the publisher both curates new and continuing talent (with a "gatekeeping" function) and also acts as a banker (or patron).

This traditional model is simple, but also highly evolved. No amount of "self-publishing" (which I use to describe the many alternative models on display) can equal this, at least when harmoniously engaged with the retail and copyright sectors. That's the issue. The Hachette model used to be fully integrated with the literary marketplace. Not any more.

And here's my second point. For 50 – perhaps 100 – years, writers, publishers and booksellers followed a literary map which a) they all believed in and b) described the cultural landcape perfectly.

Some time between 1990 and 2005 – we can debate the actual tipping point – this map became irrelevant and then redundant. The many book tribes (writers, agents, editors, booksellers) on the lonely route from the moment of putting black on white to the point of sale found that the map they'd relied on for generations no longer described the environment they inhabited.

Reich’s observation about cultural inequality is interesting, and might prove controversial to some. A larger and more diverse range of people have access to the material resources they need to pursue self-expression. A political implication is that a larger and more diverse range of people can engage in acts of political self-assertion. Some of those who do belong to outgroups. Populist conservatism often elicits the reaction of disgust from “cultural elites.” Yet the power of those “cultural elites” has waned, and there are oppositional “cultural elites” that find secular liberalism similarly distasteful. Their influence or power isn’t necessarily equivalent. But these symbolic rivals certainly have the means to assert themselves.

Like many Jews of her generation, she had an overwhelming need to find out about those members of her family who had been wiped out. Her search for Rodinsky ran in parallel with this personal quest. She pieced together the evidence from the stories of old people in crumbling Tower Hamlets tower blocks, asking questions in cafes and shops, chasing the stories across the world to Jewish research centres in Israel and Warsaw. And all the time she was building up a more detailed mental map of the old Jewish East End.

But the more she searched for Rodinsky, the more he seemed to disappear. He was all things and he was nothing. He was, according to different witnesses, both very short and very tall. He was backward and he was a genius. He was rich and he was poor. He was painfully shy and he entertained others by playing the spoons in a local cafe. He was clean-shaven and he was bearded. There was no photo of him. At times he seemed like a man who did not exist.

But Lichtenstein would not give up. There was no ending to the story, but she was sure she would find one.

She had confirmed Rodinsky's death early on. There was evidence of a lonely demise in a Surrey mental hospital at the age of 44. Rodinsky died in March 1969, just a few days before Lichtenstein's own birth. But the story that she started to unravel was far more tragic and interesting. Of an Orthodox Jewish family transplanted from the Ukraine to Whitechapel and unable to cope with the change. Of a sister who ended her life in a Claybury mental hospital, her only possessions a pair of gold earrings. Of a period that Rodinsky described cryptically as "the lost years", the clues to which stare out from his old copy of the A-Z. Of the frugal life of study that would have gone unremarked on in the Ukraine but in the East End set Rodinsky apart. He was, as Sinclair once posited, the invisible man.

As a species of human artifact, as a cultural object, as a kind of text, and as processable information data is open to a range of hermeneutic processes of interpretation. In much the same way that encoding a text is an interpretive act creating, manipulating, transferring, exploring and otherwise making use of a data set is also an interpretive act. In this case, data as an artifact or a text can be thought of as having the same potential evidentiary value of any kind of artifact. That is, analysis, interpretation, exploration and engagement with data can allow one to uncover information, facts, figures, perspectives, meanings, and traces which can be deployed as evidence to support all manner of claims and arguments. I would suggest that data is not a kind of evidence; it is a potential source of information which could hold evidentiary value.

Fitzpatrick subsequently went to work for Google, and his Utopian vision of open standards and open data became subsumed in a rivalry between Google and Facebook. Both companies now offer their version of a social graph API, and Google (which is trying to catch up) has taken up the banner of open standards and data portability.

This rivalry has brought the phrase 'social graph' into wider use. Last week Forbes even went to the extent of calling the social graph an exploitable resource comprarable to crude oil, with riches to those who figure out how to mine it and refine it.

I think this is a fascinating metaphor. If the social graph is crude oil, doesn't that make our friends and colleagues the little animals that get crushed and buried underground?

But right now I would like to take issue with the underlying concept, which I think has two flaws:

Despite their radical differences, these three books share one positive feature and one disturbing one. First, all stress (against one recent strand of opinion) that Jesus and his followers were steeped in the Jewish Scriptures, and understood what they were doing in relation to the intricate web of meaning thereby available. Second, however, in no case do we really face the central question of the gospels: what did Jesus mean by “God’s Kingdom”, and was he or wasn’t he successful in launching it? Pope Benedict highlights the “kingdom of truth” announced by Jesus to Pilate, but it looks as though this “kingdom” is, effectively, the Church, those who (supposedly) live under Jesus’s rule. Maurice Casey suggests that Jesus picked up the notion of “kingdom” that was around at the time, but then says that he told “pretty stories” about it, which we now find difficult to interpret because “we do not always understand the aspect of God’s kingship which they were intended to illustrate”. Bruce Fisk, who focuses on the standard questions (can we trust the gospels? was Jesus God incarnate? did he die for our sins? and did he rise again?), gives plenty of hints about “God’s rule” breaking in, but never provides the full-on discussion he gives to other topics. Perhaps the problem is that wherever you are in Western culture today – pre-modern, modern or postmodern, German, British, American or anything else – the dreaded word theocracy, even when radically redefined around Jesus and his cross, is a bridge too far. But until we’ve been round that loop, we have not really been paying attention to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Or, arguably, to Jesus.

The media similarly misrepresented the findings of the IPCC’s 2010 report on climate extremes. Sweden’s most prestigious daily newspaper, Svenske Dagbladet, filled almost an entire Sunday front page with an eviscerated body showing exposed arteries, adorned with the warning: “Ever warmer climate threatens more death.” Across two full pages inside, the paper presented a graph of seasonal deaths over the past decade and showed how summer heat waves have killed dozens of Swedes. Yet, even a cursory reading of the graph showed clearly that many more people die from cold than from heat.
The IPCC report did indeed state that global warming would mean more extreme warm temperatures, but it also pointed to fewer extreme cold temperatures. Because more people almost everywhere on the planet die each year from cold temperatures than from warm temperatures, the overall impact of global warming will be fewer deaths from temperature extremes. Indeed, according to one estimate, by midcentury, about 400,000 more people will die from heat than would have perished at current temperatures, but 1.8 million fewer people will die from cold. Unfortunately, nondeaths are a nonstory.

In most cases, algorithms aren't autonomous machines, however. From the perspective of digital literacy, it is better to think about an algorithm like Google's as a kind of Mechanical Turk. The "Turk" was a chess-playing machine that made it seem that it operated autonomously, a robot capable of challenging human players in a game of skill. However, the machine was not autonomous, but was operated by a person concealed in a compartment of the machine. Similarly, even though algorithms give the appearance of autonomous behavior, maintaining that semblance of autonomous action requires frequent tinkering and is dependent on guidance from human controllers. In this sense, algorithms are mechanical, in that they have features that enhance the speed or accuracy of these human decisions, but they are not independent of those decisions.

As our societies get larger and larger, there's no need, in fact, there's even less of a need for any one of us to be an innovator, whereas there is a great advantage for most of us to be copiers, or followers. And so, a real worry is that our capacity for social learning, which is responsible for all of our cumulative cultural adaptation, all of the things we see around us in our everyday lives, has actually promoted a species that isn't so good at innovation. It allows us to reflect on ourselves a little bit and say, maybe we're not as creative and as imaginative and as innovative as we thought we were, but extraordinarily good at copying and following.

If we apply this to our everyday lives and we ask ourselves, do we know the answers to the most important questions in our lives? Should you buy a particular house? What mortgage product should you have? Should you buy a particular car? Who should you marry? What sort of job should you take? What kind of activities should you do? What kind of holidays should you take? We don't know the answers to most of those things. And if we really were the deeply intelligent and imaginative and innovative species that we thought we were, we might know the answers to those things.

And if we ask ourselves how it is we come across the answers, or acquire the answers to many of those questions, most of us realize that we do what everybody else is doing. This herd instinct, I think, might be an extremely fundamental part of our psychology that was perhaps an unexpected and unintended, you might say, byproduct of our capacity for social learning, that we're very, very good at being followers rather than leaders. A small number of leaders or innovators or creative people is enough for our societies to get by.

What are the different licences for?

There are a wide range of licences that allow you to share your work, specifying whether or not you mind your work being used in a commercial context and whether you want to insist that others keep the same licence in any derivative works. All licences require that users provide attribution to the original creator and licensor (when those are different). Only the copyright holder can grant a creative commons licence. Here are the six licences.

-- Attribution (CC BY)
This lets other people distribute, remix and build upon your work -- even commercially -- as long as they credit you. This is the most flexible of licences.

-- Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)
This lets other people distribute, remix and build upon your work -- even commercially -- as long as they credit you and licence their new creations under the same terms. All new works based on yours will therefore have the same licence. This is the licence used by Wikipedia.

-- Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)
This licence allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is not changed and is credited to you.

-- Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)
This lets other people distribute, remix and build upon your work as long as they credit you and don't use it for commercial projects. Although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

-- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)
This lets other people distribute, remix and build upon your work as long as they credit you and don't use it for commercial projects. They also have to license their new creations under identical terms.

-- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)
This licence is the most restrictive, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially.

This modern, buffered self is precisely the subjectivity the Gothic tale of the doppelganger seeks to question, showing that the buffers do not work. Taylor even argues that the buffered self deals with the power of desires and passions by denying them the religious meaning they once enjoyed, so that they are reduced to the status of bodily functions to be dealt with rather than being daimonic. It is his desires for forbidden pleasures that lead Jekyll to create Mr Hyde and thus deal surgically with an inconvenience.

This is not a religious conception of identity. For Augustine of Hippo in his fifth-century Confessions, desires need to be ordered but potentially desire itself leads to God, as in the famous line: "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." Only a divine object can satisfy the power of desire.

The language of singularity, of "wholeness", only appears in the most recent liturgy, as an index of Christian decadence. Traditionally, the Christian self was a conflicted and dynamic subjectivity, and expressed in relation to a communal, wholly "porous" reality. St Paul is the architect of the flesh/spirit distinction, which is not, as is often assumed, a body/spirit dualism. The "flesh" Paul speaks of is not the body but the pull of all that enmeshes us in our selfish ego: anger and envy and ambition as well as sexual desires. "My sin," says Dorothy Sayers's Eve in one of her festival plays, "was intellectual".

People often ask me about my research techniques. You would think this would be a relatively straightforward question, but the truth is that I have to keep changing my answer, because my techniques are constantly shifting as new forms of search or discovery become possible. Right now, I'm in that thrilling stage of writing-while-still-researching my next book, and I just went through a little episode of discovery that I think might be worth mapping out, as a case study of how ideas come into being, at least in my little corner of the world.

Web philosophy is an idiom devoid of objective, impersonal thinking. In 2008, the Columbia Review of Journalism interviewed a man named Clay Shirky about the pitfalls of modern Luddism and the meaning of information overload. Shirky teaches interactive telecommunications at NYU and wrote a book about social media called Here Comes Everybody. In the CRJ interview, Shirky said things like ‘I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on.’ This is the message net-obsessed people always deliever; the condescending phrase most uttered by frothing New Media advocates is ‘You just don’t get it.’ The truth of the matter is that Clay Shirky must argue that the Internet is having a positive effect – it’s the only reason he’s publicly essential. Prior to 1996, no one wanted to interview Clay Shirky about anything.

IS CREATIVE WORK WITHOUT MYSTIFICATION possible in such an environment? An answer to this question is given by the stories of Philip K. Dick. While these stand out from the background against which they have originated, it is not easy to capture the ways in which they do, since Dick employs the same materials and theatrical props as other American writers. From the warehouse which has long since become their common property, he takes the whole threadbare lot of telepaths, cosmic wars, parallel worlds, and time travel. In his stories terrible catastrophes happen, but this too is no exception to the rule, for lengthening the list of sophisticated ways in which the world can end is among the standard preoccupations of SF. But where other SF writers explicitly name and delimit the source of the disaster, whether social (terrestrial or cosmic war) or natural (elemental forces of nature), the world of Dick's stories suffers dire changes for reasons which remain unascertainable to the end. People perish not because a nova or a war has erupted, not because of flood, famine, plague, drought, or sterility, nor because the Martians have landed on our doorstep; rather, there is some inscrutable factor at work which is visible in its manifestations but not at its source, and the world behaves as if it has fallen prey to a malignant cancer which through metastases attacks one area of life after another. This is, be it said forthwith, apposite as a castigation of historiographic diagnostics, since in fact humanity does not as a rule succeed in exhaustively or conclusively diagnosing the causes of the afflictions which befall it. It is sufficient to recall how many diverse and in part mutually exclusive factors are nowadays adduced by experts as sources of the crisis of civilization. And this, be it added, is also appropriate as an artistic presupposition, since literature which furnishes the reader with godlike omniscience about all narrated events is today an anachronism which neither the theory of art nor the theory of knowledge will undertake to defend.

The typical Dick novel is at once fantastically original in its ideas and dutifully realistic in charting their consequences. No matter what things may come, they will be exploited, merchandised, and routinized by the force of human weakness. And the interesting corollary: it won’t matter; the world of speaking ghosts will work about as well as this one. A society of paranoids can work as well as Nixon’s America did and, perhaps, in similar ways.

"A bicycle shed is a building," wrote Nikolaus Pevsner. "Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture", a statement so begging to be contradicted as to send one searching for the nation's most beautiful bicycle sheds. As for his choice of Lincoln as an ultimate exemplar, out of the whole wealth of European architecture, it's an intriguing one. It is not the most famous, glamorous, biggest or most perfect of gothic cathedrals, although it was possibly the tallest building in the world until its spire collapsed in the 16th century. Its appeal is something to do with its balance: French cathedrals of the same period – the 12th and 13th centuries – pursued the greatest possible height and the most logical possible structure, whereas Lincoln has more ribs in the vaults than structurally necessary and enriches its clean lines with decoration. It is also, if not the biggest, big enough to be impressive. In any case, Pevsner had company in his admiration: John Ruskin called it "the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles".

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

Yet Milton's intention to write a great English poem was primary. He had been thinking about it for more than 20 years. Some time in 1641-42 he jotted down some ideas as to what his poem should be about. These were drawn from the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments, but also ranged across national themes. He flirted, for example, with writing on King Arthur. His drive to write was both religious and moral in the pattern of the Renaissance humanist. "The end of learning," he wrote at about this time, "is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright." In other words, you rebuilt from the destruction wrought by the fall through study. In saying this Milton conceived of everything he read (and his range was both wide and deep) as tending to this end: Plato to Euripides to Homer to Ovid (a particular favourite) to Ariosto and Tasso and Shakespeare as well as Job and the Revelation of St John the Divine. Everything out there of value could help to redeem you. For Milton, all knowledge led you, though in a winding route and on a "dark voyage", back to paradise, walking and talking with God in the cool of the evening. It is no wonder, then (though as we have seen Marvell did wonder) that his paradise contained as much as he could stuff in of everything he had learned, from everywhere.

To put it another way, we have entered a period of rationalist purgation. Rationalism and reason are antonyms: the first is fixed and incurious; the second, open and inductive. Rationalism is forever settling on one model of reality; reason tends toward an appraising interest in things as they come. Rationalism projects, and its projections typically fill it with alarm because of the inadequacy of its model, which, to the rationalist mind, appears as the perversity of the world. To this mind every problem is systemic, therefore vast and urgent. Rationalism is the omnium-gatherum of resentment and foreboding, the omnium-scatterum of everything of any kind that appears to stand in the way of a correction of reality back toward rational standards. Like paranoia, it all makes perfect sense, once its assumptions are granted. Again, like paranoia, it gathers evidence opportunistically, and is utterly persuaded by it, fueling its confidence to the point of sometimes messianic certainty. Ideology is rational, a pure product of the human mind.

At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some students performed at high levels, and some programs fostered more learning than others. In general, though, two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.

Reader exhibits the best unpaid representation I’ve yet seen of a consumer’s relationship to a content producer. You pay for HBO? That’s a strong signal. Consuming free stuff? Reader’s model was a dream. Even better than Netflix. You get affinity (which has clear monetary value) for free, and a tracked pattern of behavior for the act of iterating over differently sourced items – and a mechanism for distributing that quickly to an ostensible audience which didn’t include social guilt or gameification – along with an extensible, scalable platform available via commonly used web technologies – all of which would be an amazing opportunity for the right product visionary.

While “The Marriage Plot” falls into the latter category, I adored Mr. Eugenides’s previous works so much that I was too impatient to wait for it to be shipped or until I had a window of time to run to a bookstore. I bought it for my Kindle the day it went on sale.

But I found myself unable to concentrate on the narrative, and I struggled to invest in the unfolding plot lines and engage in the wry and complex interplay between characters amidst the jostling on my my train commute, where I was most likely to devour a couple of pages of the book at a time.

When I finished the book, I felt deeply unsatisfied.

Does consuming books on an e-Reader shape the way our brains absorb and process what we’ve read? Is an e-reader suited for longer format fiction? By all counts, it should be, but perhaps my brain is conditioned to reading — and absorbing and processing — material on a screen differently than on the printed page.

What makes this modern feudalism powerful is that the key parties are keeping their methods of control from the users.

Neither company openly gives details to users about how their data is being used. We never see inside Google's algorithms, or gain a view of how our connections interweave with every other person on Facebook, but their services see all.

The bottom line is that if it passes and becomes law, the new act would give the government and copyright holders a giant stick — if not an automatic weapon — with which to pursue websites and services they believe are infringing on their content. With little or no requirement for a court hearing, they could remove websites from the internet and shut down their ability to be found by search engines or to process payments from users. DMCA takedown notices would effectively be replaced by this nuclear option, and innocent websites would have to fight to prove that they deserved to be restored to the internet — a reversal of the traditional American judicial approach of being assumed innocent until proven guilty — at which point any business they had would be destroyed.

What I advocate here is not to dispense with teaching students how to use sources but rather to abandon our fixation on the form rather than the function of source attribution. Here's why: We cannot control how much time and effort students invest in a particular writing assignment; we can only influence how they distribute their energies. Professors' overattention to flawless citation (or grammar) creates predictable results: Students expend a disproportionate amount of precious time and attention trying to avoid making mistakes. Soon, they also begin to associate "good" writing with mechanically following rules rather than developing good ideas.

In contrast, experienced writers (like us) edit meticulously only after they have allocated substantial effort to more complex and consequential writing tasks, such as refining their topics, selecting and processing their sources, organizing their ideas, and drafting and revising their manuscripts to improve focus and coherence. Nitpicky professors hinder student writers' development by effectively forcing them to invest more time and thinking in less important elements of writing.

Recent research by the Citation Project corroborates how severely teachers' citation psychosis has diminished students' information-literacy skills, in particular. Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson blame "plagiarism hysteria," which compels teachers to punish improper citation more than reward students' effective use of sources' words and ideas. Thus, clever students master quotation "mining" and sloppy paraphrasing, and they rarely summarize (or, presumably, deeply read or understand) their sources. Why should they, when success equals completing a checklist ("minimum of six sources including two books, two peer-reviewed articles ... proper MLA format, including a period before the parenthetical citation for block quotations") rather than composing writing that engages readers with sophisticated content or, heaven forbid, eloquent prose? Should we not judge writing on its content and character rather than its surface features?

In the past I’ve written and lectured about the idea that we’re leaving an era where design operates in the narrative mode, in which its fundamental purpose is to create canonical, highly controlled visual stories. We’re now in an era — the digital era — where the new paradigm is designing for behavior: creating stateful systems that are responsive to user inputs and environmental inputs, where presentation is not just separated from content, but where presentation is volatile and continually changing by nature.
These two modes of thinking are so different and even so in conflict with one another that to find a nexus between them is very difficult. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” and that, more or less, is what’s required to be a great editorial experience designer. You must understand users and their expectations, and you must also understand authors and their expectations, and somehow, by hook or by crook, you must reconcile these wildly divergent worldviews into a single, coherent whole that looks and feels effortless.

The conventional wisdom is that America has become a “service economy,” but actually, in many sectors, “service” is disappearing. There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge, then settle your bill. Today, all those jobs have been transferred to the customer: we pump our own gas, squeegee our own windshield, and pay our own bill by swiping a credit card. Where customers once received service from the service station, they now provide “self-service” — a synonym for “no service.” Technology enables this sleight of hand, which lets gas stations cut their payrolls, having co-opted their patrons into doing these jobs without pay.

Examples abound, helping drive unemployment rates. Airports now have self-service check-in kiosks that allow travelers to perform the jobs of ticket agents. Travel agents once unearthed, perused and compared fares, deals and hotel rates. Shadow-working travelers now do all of this themselves on their computer screens. Medical patients are now better informed than ever — as a result of hours of online shadow work. In 1998, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that taxpayers spent six billion hours per year on “tax compliance activities.” That’s serious shadow work, the equivalent of three million full-time jobs.

One thing that seems clear: In the future, just about everyone on the Internet will be publishing all the time, and the once-rigid boundaries between “reader” and “writer,” already blurring, will disappear entirely. “If there is anything the Web has taught us, it is that consumption is not the only role for a human being anymore,” said Richard Nash, a publisher.

The challenge will be to sort all of that material into ephemeral and semipermanent baskets, some of which might be called, for lack of a better term, books. But at the moment, as Mr. Hellman said, online books are largely stuck in the “pretend it’s print” model. That works for traditional publishers because it offers a model that looks a lot like the past but ultimately depends on a notion of false scarcity.

Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge. Dan Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is a leading expert on how students learn. “Data from the last thirty years leads to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not only because you need something to think about,” Willingham has written. “The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).” Just because you can Google the date of Black Thursday doesn’t mean you understand why the Great Depression happened or how it compares to our recent economic slump. And sorting the wheat from the abundant online chaff requires more than simply evaluating the credibility of the source (the tree octopus material was supplied by the “Kelvinic University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society,” which sounded impressive to the seventh graders in Don Leu’s experiment). It demands the knowledge of facts that can be used to independently verify or discredit the information on the screen.

First, I still do suspect that straight Christians often use "We're all broken!"/"The ground is level at the foot of the Cross"-type language, when discussing homosexuality, as a kind of rhetorical toll to be paid before you can get to the thing you're actually interested in talking about, which is Other People's Problems. If there's a danger of pharisaism for gay Christians who insist they're not broken, not like those messed-up addicts or crazy people (We Are Respectable Homos!), there's also a danger of pharisaism for straight Christians who want to use the language of brokenness when discussing situations they've never been in.

Second, and relatedly, using language of brokenness in the context of an already-stigmatized group has the obvious potential to provoke shame rather than humility, despair rather than surrender to God. I don't know that I need to go into detail here really, do I? Gay pride is wrong, but it's the wrong response to gay shame.

Thirdly, what do you do with a broken thing? I mean, you either throw it out or fix it, right? The imagery does not conduce to viewing homosexuality as a potential source of insight for the Christian. It's not a metaphor which suggests vocation. It's a metaphor in which one's orientation is a problem to be solved or at best endured. Even imagery of woundedness is more complex, insofar as wounds, in Christian thought, are not solely healed but sometimes glorified.

And finally, the language has been handled so much in this context that it's a cliche, a coin with its face worn off. When you say "brokenness" and "gay" in the same sentence I think a lot of people can only hear the five thousand previous times someone has used the metaphor, no matter what you personally intend to say with it.

But there's enough good in it that I wonder if it can be rescued, revived. After all, there are ways of describing a broken place as a place of insight--that's where the light gets in.

So I'm posting this more as a provocation than anything else: Talk to me more about brokenness. It isn't a metaphor which comes naturally to me and it's easier for me to see the limitations than the insights or beauty it can provide. But I think there's some poetry to be found here if we're willing to look for it: Are you broken like a wave, coming home on sharp rocks? Are you broken like a voice deepening into manhood? Are you broken like the Eucharist?

Books both e- and analog — the kind that exist not to tell a tale, but to advance an argument — face a fundamental challenge: The interests of books-as-artifacts and books-as-arguments are, in general, misaligned…. The precise thing that makes idea-driven books so valuable to readers — their immersive qualities, the intimate, one-on-one relationship they facilitate between authors and readers — also make them pretty lousy as actual sharers of ideas. Books don’t go viral.
Garber was basically arguing that the economic pressures on books have been “designed to advance books within the marketplace, rather than the marketplace of ideas.” But in saying so, Garber also invoked a broader, more interesting question, too: Do complex, important ideas need to go viral?

Tasting Report

Le Chiuse, $22, *** ½
Rosso di Montalcino 2008
Pure, firm, balanced and perfumed with great texture and persistent flavors of red fruit, flowers and smoke. (Frederick Wildman & Sons, New York)

Altesino, $25, *** ½
Rosso di Montalcino 2009
Dense and rich yet clear and graceful with silky, lush flavors of flowers, cherries and licorice. (Winebow/Leonardo LoCasio Selections, New York)

Poggio Antico, $33, ***
Rosso di Montalcino 2008
Dark and tannic with earthy, spicy aromas of cherries and violets. (The Sorting Table, Napa, Calif.)

Uccelliera, $28, ***
Rosso di Montalcino 2009
Earthy and well-balanced with sweet, ripe fruit flavors and vibrant acidity. (Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, N.Y.)

BEST VALUE
Mocali, $17, ***
Rosso di Montalcino 2009
Pure, fresh, light-bodied and elegant with pretty aromas of red fruit, flowers and smoke. (Michael Skurnik Wines)

Given the relative wealth of “distraction-free” writing programs available online, each purports to be unique in promising to deliver the same, basic thing: increased focus on the task at hand. Both the programs themselves and their descriptive pitches enable and frame the act, purpose, and value of writing in different ways. Some are very process-oriented; others are more expressive. Many exhibit stark, monochromatic styles, harkening back to simpler times. 
In other words, certain programs invite certain kinds of writers. For instance, Writer for iPad implies concern about "destroying the voice and the organic structure of our original thought." Meanwhile, Ommwriter "believes in making writing a pleasure once again, vindicating the close relationship between writer and paper."

Furthermore, WriteRoom "gets your computer out of the way so that you can focus on your work." These programs are pitched and presented more as environments than tools. They are more spaces for us to write from/within and less instruments facilitating the writing process, if it is a process at all.

So, let’s see if any of these programs fulfill their promises.

on ALL of Beethoven's sonatas

The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man's relation to it; he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man's limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.

From a programming standpoint none of the features introduced in KF8 are in any way supercharged capabilities that require special hardware. Let’s face it. eBook reader software is, in effect, nothing more than a specialized web browser. It is not rocket science! Therefore, Amazon’s decision is hard to comprehend. Web browser implementations have been written a thousand times — I wrote one myself 10 years ago for use in a computer game. There are reference implementations out there that they could have used for free, all things that should have made it possible to retain a unified platform. So, why could’t the software engineers at Amazon make sure they introduce these capabilities in all devices through firmware upgrades?

It is a very short-sighted decision in my opinion, that not only shortchanges the end users, but causes a lot of problems on Amazon’s end as well.

They will now have to begin offering and delivering different versions of the same books – one formatted according to the old, outdated MOBI file specifications, and another one formatted according to the new KF8 guidelines for this to make any sense. How does that make sense?

The search engine itself, whether Google or the search bar on your favorite content site (often the same engine, under the hood), is an algorithm that promises to provide a logical set of results in response to a query, but is in fact the result of an algorithm designed to take a range of criteria into account so as to serve up results that satisfy, not just the user, but the aims of the provider, their vision of relevance or newsworthiness or public import, and the particular demands of their business model. As James Grimmelmann observed, “Search engines pride themselves on being automated, except when they aren’t.” When Amazon, or YouTube, or Facebook, offer to algorithmically and in real time report on what is “most popular” or “liked” or “most viewed” or “best selling” or “most commented” or “highest rated,” it is curating a list whose legitimacy is based on the presumption that it has not been curated. And we want them to feel that way, even to the point that we are unwilling to ask about the choices and implications of the algorithms we use every day.

But at today’s meeting I kept coming back to a more basic question, a question faced by any new website or digital project: Why would anyone use it? For something as ambitious (and potentially as expensive) as the DPLA, there is the further question: Why would anyone choose to visit the DPLA first, rather than, say, commercial providers like Google or Amazon, or non-profit entities such as the Internet Archive’s Open Library or OCLC’s Worldcat? Or as Ed Summers more succinctly put it last spring: In what way will the DPLA be better than the web?

Because of these critical root questions, I believe the DPLAs faces a huge uphill battle upon launch. Today, I started a list of elements that could help draw an audience to the DPLA—in the same way that public libraries continue to attract huge numbers of patrons. This list represents a shift of my views about the DPLA from the meeting at Harvard in the spring, where I advocated for advanced research modes. (For this reason, I think some of the data-mining DPLA “beta sprint” prototypes are headed in the wrong direction, at least for this initial phase.) I now think that, at least at first, we have to focus on the P in DPLA.

extraMUROS is an open-source HTML5 infrastructure built on public APIs that aims to fundamentally change the way people discover, curate and share digital collections of books, images, sounds, video and other media. extraMUROS is a unique collaboration between the metaLAB (at) Harvard, Frances Loeb Library, the Harvard Library Lab and a network of journalists, designers and developers. This page presents a series of work-in-progress experiments.

extraMUROS is in the Beta Sprint of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Our vision is of a world in which libraries provide a user-centered experience that encourages all categories of citizens to engage with the cultural patrimony of humanity as if it were their own: to learn from it, make things with it, share these things, and become involved in a lifelong, society-wide process of learning. Most of all, we seek to cast the user in a proactive, participatory role, to complete the process of democratization that was the driving force behind the growth of the public library movement in the 19th century, but under digital terms.

The eclectic German post-structuralist philosopher and media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who has died aged 68, once wrote: "We are the subjects of gadgets and instruments of mechanical data processing." He was entirely serious. In his extraordinary book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) he argued that "those early and seemingly harmless machines capable of storing and therefore separating sounds, sights and writing ushered in a technologising of information".

Later technologies – the internet in particular – further extended technology's domination over us. He told one interviewer in 2006 that the internet hardly promotes human communication: "The development of the internet has more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies … after all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us."

Kittler, sometimes dubbed the "Derrida of the digital age", thus tapped into humanity's fear of being neutralised by its own tools. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter was written in the wake of such science-fiction fantasies as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and the first Terminator movie in which übercyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger travelled back in time to destroy humanity. Kittler's point was not that machines will exterminate us; rather that we are deluded to consider ourselves masters of our technological domain.

While the 2010s are now hitting the market, I’ve recently gorged on Kabinetts from the excellent 2009 vintage. I love the wines of Willi Schaefer, and the 2009 Willi Schaefer Graacher Himmelreich Riesling Kabinett ($24) is a typically delicate, sublime effort from this acclaimed Mosel producer who now enjoys a cult-within-a-cult following among riesling zealots. It was also one of the stars of my recent hot dog and wine tasting. I long ago swore allegiance to the cult of JJ Prum, and the 2009 JJ Prüm Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Kabinett ($33) gave me no reason to reconsider. Sure, there was the usual sulfurous stink on the nose—always a problem with drinking Prum young—but the wine was light, almost airy in texture and packed a toothsome medley of lime, apple, and mineral flavors. A lot of people believe that Helmut Dönnhoff, whose vineyards are in the Nahe region, is Germany’s most talented winemaker, and the 2009 Dönnhoff Oberhäuser Leistenberg Riesling Kabinett ($25) made a persuasive case on his behalf. It was a finely chiseled, delicious wine that radiated completeness. Selbach-Oster is a great producer in the Mosel whose wines also offer sensational value. The 2009 Selbach-Oster Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling Kabinett ($18) was just a terrific bottle, with perfect balance, superb minerality, and an herbal twang that I loved. The 2009 Zilliken (Forstmeister Geltz) Saarburger Riesling Kabinett ($23) was as much a mouthful to taste as it is to pronounce; this is the kind of voluptuous Kabinett that leads people to say that true Kabinetts no longer exist. That said, the wine was excellent, its richness parried by plenty of zesty acidity and a beam of minerality.

As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books?

I know of very few friends from that period who continue to practice Theory as it was taught to us then. But a striking number of semiotics students have gone on to influential careers in the media and the creative arts. (Perhaps anticipating this development, during my tenure at Brown the concentration was renamed Modern Culture and Media.) NPR’s Ira Glass, the novelist Rick Moody, the filmmaker Todd Haynes, Eugenides himself — all spent their formative years in the semiotics program. The antihero of Sam Lipsyte’s hilarious 2010 novel, “The Ask,” takes theory classes at a college clearly modeled on Brown. (Lipsyte was in fact my roommate for most of my college career; I like to think the stinging parodies of semio-babble in that book were modeled on his other friends.) A long list of aspiring semioticians went on to play important roles in the early days of digital media. Looking back, I suspect the semiotic worldview — with its constant emphasis on “textual play” — gave us conceptual antennas that helped us tune in to the hypertextual chaos of the Web when it first emerged.

Semiotics, for all its needless complications, still taught us to look for new possibilities in the ordinary, turning signs into new wonders. For all our talk about being post-everything, the most interesting thing about us turned out to be what we were pre- .

National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology

Do Murakami's stories themselves make people feel as if their lives have some meaning? Some critics are unsure what to make of him, the prejudice being that a writer who is so popular, particularly among young people, cannot really be that good, even if he is now quoted at short odds each year to win the Nobel prize for literature. But Murakami's success speaks to a hunger for what he is doing that is unusual. Most characters in the modern commercial genre called "literary fiction" take for granted a certain unexamined metaphysics and worry exclusively about the higher-level complexities of circumstance and relationships. Throughout Murakami's oeuvre, on the other hand, his characters never cease to express their bafflement about the nature of time, or change, or consciousness, or moral choice, or the simple fact of finding themselves alive, in this world or another. In this sense, Murakami's heroes and heroines are all philosophers. It is natural, then, that his work should enchant younger readers, to whom the problems of being are still fresh, as well as others who never grew out of such puzzlements – that his books should seem an outstretched hand of sympathy to anyone who feels that they too have been tossed, without their permission, into a labyrinth.

Have you pretended to find a book interesting that actually was deeply boring or found your gaze drifting off during a movie?

The worlds of art, politics and business are attempting to find out what we really think about things by using new technology that, it claims, can track our emotions and attention.

Great article: "How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded in Learning to Code" http://t.co/ZMayDIMc #thatcamp #pdgy

Recently I set out to explore my lifelong relationship with science fiction, both as reader and as writer. I say "lifelong", for among the first things I wrote as a child might well merit the initials SF. Like a great many children before and since, I was an inventor of other worlds. Mine were rudimentary, as such worlds are when you're six or seven or eight, but they were emphatically not of this here-and-now Earth, which seems to be one of the salient features of SF. I wasn't much interested in Dick and Jane: the creepily ultra-normal characters did not convince me. Saturn was more my speed, and other realms even more outlandish. Our earliest loves, like revenants, have a way of coming back in other forms; or, to paraphrase Wordsworth, the child is mother to the woman. To date, I have written three full-length fictions that nobody would ever class as sociological realism: The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Are these books "science fiction", I am often asked. Though sometimes I am not asked, but told: I am a silly nit or a snob or a genre traitor for dodging the term because these books are as much "science fiction" as Nineteen Eighty-Four is, whatever I might say. But is Nineteen Eighty-Four as much "science fiction" as The Martian Chronicles? I might reply. I would answer not, and therein lies the distinction.

So, what are the protesters so upset about, really?

Do they have legitimate gripes?

To answer the latter question first, yes, they have very legitimate gripes.

And if America cannot figure out a way to address these gripes, the country will likely become increasingly "de-stabilized," as sociologists might say. And in that scenario, the current protests will likely be only the beginning.

The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation's history, and unemployment has reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression. And, at the same time, corporate profits are at a record high.

In other words, in the never-ending tug-of-war between "labor" and "capital," there has rarely—if ever—been a time when "capital" was so clearly winning.

This post discusses my experience converting a large MS Word document into a LaTeX document using Word-to-LaTeX. Along the way I encountered several challenges. I thought I'd document them in case it may be of interest to others.

There has been much talk of the “online revolution” in higher education. While there is a place for online education, some of its boosters anticipate displacing the traditional campus altogether. A close reading of their arguments, however, makes clear that many share what might be called the “individualist fallacy,” both in their understanding of how students learn and how professors teach.

I incorporated an exercise that I discovered on the University of Virginia Teaching Resource Center called the Zen Ten. The basic idea in the exercise is for the instructor to remain silent and let the students run discussion. I point them to a passage in the text or give them an opening question, and I tell them that I will not speak for the next fifteen minutes. Instead I will observe their discussion and take a few notes. I have found the exercise to be challenging for me (it can be very hard to not jump in) and very beneficial for students. It breaks them out of the passive learning pattern because they know that no matter what, there is nothing from the professor to absorb or write down. I’ve incorporated the exercise into several different classes, and in each case, just about everyone has spoken at least once, even students who haven’t said a word in class up to that point. When the time has passed, I make sure to comment on the discussion as a whole first before engaging specific comments. In the case of SoS, the exercise turned the silence around. Rather than seeing it as oppressive, I started to see it as an opportunity.

(One of out greatest enemies in the current situation is abstraction, and Cathy Davidson's writing exemplifies that problem. She is SO abstract. She makes one statement after another that no one could plausibly object to because it's so vaguely anodyne. Can we get down to cases, for heaven's sake?)

In order for social networks to truly reshape our experience of the rest of the Web, developers must first understand the relationship between our social graphs and our interest graphs.

A social graph is a digital map that says, "This is who I know." It may reflect people who the user knows in various ways: as family members, work colleagues, peers met at a conference, high school classmates, fellow cycling club members, friend of a friend, etc. Social graphs are mostly created on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, where users send reciprocal invites to those they know, in order to map out and maintain their social ties.

An interest graph is a digital map that says, "This is what I like." As Twitter's CEO has remarked, if you see that I follow the San Francisco Giants on Twitter, that doesn't tell you if I know the team's players, but it does tell you a lot about my interest in baseball. Interest graphs are generated by the feeds customers follow (e.g. on Twitter), products they buy (e.g. on Amazon), ratings they create (e.g. on Netflix), searches they run (e.g. on Google), or questions they answer about their tastes (e.g. on services like Hunch).

That, however, is also not my point. I have no doubt that evolutionary biology has much to say, and will continue to find more to say, regarding these strange symmetries across discontinuities in the lineages of living things. My question really is one regarding method. If there were a case in which modern biological method came up against a reality that seemed to point towards orders of causality it could not logically investigate without altering its working premises radically, would it be able to recognize that it had reached its limit? Could it admit as much to itself, or tell us about it? It is an imprecise question, so open as perhaps to be vacuous, but I raise it just the same, because only when a method is conscious of what it cannot explain can it maintain a clear distinction between the knowledge it secures and the ideology it obeys.

There are two different ways to change line spacing in LaTeX. One is simpler, the other requires a package, but is more flexible.