"So what is it that sites like Findings and Readmill do? I would say that they enable asynchronous interactive digital commentary. That's a mouthful; it's a lot easier to say that they "make reading social." But easier in this case is definitely not better. All these digital possibilities are turning the old and familiar experience of reading on its head, and the language we have to describe the changes hasn't even begun to catch up. It needs to start."

"James Joyce's narration leads us through the difficulty of finding knowledge in a pre-Internet era, reminding us how lucky we are to have this technology, despite all its flaws."

"But that network has not always been the Internet, which is Cerf’s point. That is, his argument is that we should not be advocating for access to today’s-most-used network as a basic human, but should be looking for the deeper principles of human equality that require advocacy. Take care of those and access to the Internet will come almost as a matter of course. That’s what I take Cerf to be arguing, anyway, and I think this response fails to address it."

"So I (and several others) had a debate on Twitter today with Megan McArdle about children on airplanes. Megan’s basic argument, as expressed in this tweet and elsewhere is that, out of courtesy for others, parents of small children should avoid bringing them onto airplanes except when absolutely necessary. Here’s why Megan is wrong:"

"I read this last night, and then went to bed and dreamed that several people I know only from Twitter showed up at my house. We were having a wonderful impromptu party, when I suddenly realized that they were expecting me to put them up for the night. In the dream I took it for granted that if you follow someone on Twitter you are obliged to give them hospitality whenever they need it; my only concern was where to put them all, because I didn’t have nearly enough beds to accommodate the visitors."

"Why do people keep saying stupid, stupid stuff like this [quote about social networking  from NYTimes piece above]? Do they really believe that there are people out there who would be producing ground-breaking scientific hypotheses and incisive critiques of pure reason if they weren’t constantly being distracted by Facebook updates and lolcats? Do they truly believe that Twitter is depriving us of Einsteins? “Albert, you need work work on your general theory of relativity.” “Yeah, I know, but hang on — I’ve got to tell my tweeps about this fabulous schnitzel.”"

"I don't think of the distinction btwn readers & nonreaders—better, those who love reading & those who don't so much—in terms of class, which may be a function of my being a teacher of literature rather than a sociologist, but may also be a function of my knowledge that readers can be found at all social stations…much of the anxiety about American reading habits…arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of "the reading class" beyond what may be its natural limits…<br />
<br />
American universities are largely populated by people who don't fit either category [readers & extreme readers]—often really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive…<br />
<br />
All this is to say that the idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least to appreciate & enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education."

"These two blockquotes, curated by Andrew Simone and Alan Jacobs respectively, arrived in my RSS reader within moments of each other. I liked Jacobs’s adjective, which applies to Simone’s selection, too: “Kierkegaardian.”"

"Alan Jacobs…The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction…argues that, contrary to doomsayers, reading is alive & well in America. His interactions w/ students & readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, w/ proper focus & attentiveness, w/ due discretion & discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first & foremost, good for you—intellectual equivalent of eating Brussels sprouts.<br />
<br />
For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, & much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, & do so w/out shame, whether it be Stephen King or King James Bible. Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, & playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, & the book explores everything from invention of silent reading…"

"Q: how does reading fiction help you become a nonfiction writer? A: I'm a southerner, started school early (and tiny): I'm a storyteller."<br />
<br />
"I talked with Alan about this afterwards, and we both agreed that the structure of reading-as-morally-virtuous vs reading-as-guilty-pleasure has metastasized to virtually every kind of media: newspapers, movies, television. We all want to be reading and watching the right things, the best things, and can be the subject of shame when we're not. It's a structure."<br />
<br />
"Q: What about audiobooks? What is reading? A: We're rooted in storytelling, but for me, it's rooted in reading aloud, that connection."

"So I’d suggest this as the beginnings of a taxonomy:

1) The Linker: That’s what most of us are. We just link to things we’re interested in, without any particular agenda or system at work…my Pinboard page…page of links.

2) The Coolhunter: People who strive to find the unusual, the striking, the amazing — the very, very cool, often within certain topical boundaries, but widely & loosely defined ones…Kottke & Maria Popova…

3) The Curator: There are some. Not many…tends to have a clear & strict focus…some particular area of interest…finds things that other people can’t find…easily…having access to stuff that is not fully public…putting stuff online for the first time…having a unique take on public material…Bibliodyssey is a genuinely curated site; also, just because of its highly distinctive sensibility, Things magazine.

…not saying that one of these categories is superior to the others. They’re just all different, and the difference is worth noting."

[A thread on Twitter about interdisciplinarity…]

"Interdisciplinarity" seems so formal, like a treaty organization. I like the version that's about smuggling stuff across borders. [http://twitter.com/swarthmoreburke/status/63037778606292992 ]

@swarthmoreburke @publichistorian "Idea Smuggler". Love it. [http://twitter.com/navalang/status/63039078488211456 ]

@swarthmoreburke @navalang @publichistorian Cross-disciplinary. Anti-disciplinary. Black-market scholarship. [http://twitter.com/tcarmody/status/63041041145663488 ]

@tcarmody @swarthmoreburke @navalang @publichistorian Bricolage. [http://twitter.com/ayjay/status/63042045635334144 ]

[Additional, unassembled thoughts: discipline tunneling, cross-pollination, kludge, bilge, edupunk, thought trafficking, pirates, buccaneer scholar, clandestine, etc.]

"Whatever the reason for gender imbalance, college administrators across country have been going to great lengths to lasso boys—adding sports programs, building bigger gyms, expanding departments in engineering, math, & hard sciences, which are historically attractive to men. & presidents make sure their admissions directors are doing their best to ‘rectify’ the problem of gender imbalance by lowering the academic threshold for the (mostly white) boys who apply. Anyone who doubts the futility of human progress should ponder this. After several generations of vicious racism, followed by protest marches, civil rights lawsuits, accusations of bigotry, appeals to color-blindness, feminism, & eloquent invocations of the meritocratic ideal, the latest admissions trend in American higher education is affirmative action for white men. Just like the old days." —One more irresistible quote from Crazy U. As Mr. Burns says in The Simpsons Movie, “For once, the rich white man is in control.”

"Sometimes I find myself walking home from work around the time the local elementary school dismisses its charges for the day. When this happens my daily journey becomes a little more interesting and a little more complicated, because children don’t walk the way adults do. Children will run past you, then stop and squat to look at a slug on the sidewalk, then run past you. Even when no stimulus, sluggish or otherwise, presents itself, they’ll slow down and dawdle for a while before hoofing it again. Also, for any given weather they might be wildly over- or under-dressed. The other day the temperature was in the high forties when I saw ahead of me two girls, ten years old or so… They were walking home from school and so had accoutered themselves, but neither seemed to notice the differences. They dawdled, and ran, and dawdled. I dodged them when necessary, which was often.<br />
<br />
Adults aren’t like this. Adults dress appropriately and move steadily towards their goals."

"A convergence that needed documentation: Ayjay posted a poem from Andrew Hudgins called “Praying Drunk,” which included this line: “… At night / deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. / They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, / of course, they’re beautiful.” A few days earlier Rob Greco posted a link to di liu’s animal regulation series, which had the above picture of an abnormally large deer, which makes deer look very much “like enormous rats on stilts except, / of course, they’re beautiful.”"

"There are of course some people — some blessed few — who have the judgment to pursue their own educational path. But in my experience there are far more people who think they have that discernment than actually possess it. I have had too many former students come back to tell me how little they knew in comparison to what they thought they knew; and again and again I see people following career paths (and personal paths) that they never could have imagined in those days when they were perfectly sure that they knew where they were going. A key task of liberal education is to give people intellectual tools that they can use on any path they happen to travel."

“How do you help your children balance when the whole education system is pushing, pushing, pushing, and you want your kids to be successful?”<br />
<br />
—Parents Embrace ‘Race to Nowhere,’ on Pressures of School - NYTimes [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/education/09nowhere.html?pagewanted=all]<br />
<br />
Answer [Alan Jacobs]: You don’t accept a rigid, simplistic, social-climbing model of what counts as “success.”

Alan Jacobs on Michael Arrington's talk at Berkley and the response by Vivek Wadhwa at Techcrunch: "I think we have a case of competing errors here. Arrington’s “go ahead and drop out” advice is probably wrong, but the idea that “any education will carry you far” is probably wronger."

"In my last post about Infinite Jest I mentioned the philosophical-theological-spiritual problem of the interesting. With that in mind, it’s . . . um . . . interesting? — no, let’s say it’s thought-provoking to note this excerpt from The Pale King, the novel Wallace left unfinished at his death. Here Lane Dean, Jr., a worker for the IRS, is thinking about boredom — and I will indicate by ellipsis the many sentences I am leaving out, which (as you will see if you read the excerpt) tell us about all the things that are (of course) distracting Lane Dean, Jr. as he tries to think about boredom:<br />
<br />
"Donne, of course, called it lethargie, and for a time it seems conjoined somewhat with melancholy, saturninia, otiositas, tristitia; that is, to be confused with sloth and torpor and lassitude and eremia and vexation and distemper and attributed to spleen""

"Rod Dreher…tells a thought-provoking story about the combined effects on a reader, namely him, of (a) an iPad and a (b) sabbatical from blogging: "So, I burrowed in last night to read an hour of [Franzen’s] "Freedom," and ended up staying on the couch for two hours, until I finished the book ... I tried to recall the last time I had finished a novel, or any book (I've always got several going at any given moment). I couldn't. Partly this is because Franzen's novel is such a good read, but I think mostly it's because I was in the habit of stopping whatever I was doing to blog about a compelling insight, or even simply to blog a moving passage of whatever I was reading. It occurred to me this morning that this way of reading worked hard against allowing a narrative to sink its hook into me. I was never able to give myself over completely to the narrative, fictional or non-fictional."

"Did Infinite Jest change your life?<br />
<br />
I don't think so, but again, we’ll see. I think it’s probably the most incisive exploration of what Kierkegaard called the aesthetic life — the need for, the addiction to, the interesting — that we’ve seen since, well, Kierkegaard. In this context Auden once wrote, “All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.” That strikes me as a pretty good one-sentence summary of Infinite Jest. But of course the very idea of a “one-sentence summary of Infinite Jest” is intrinsically laughable. A bad jest."

"I wonder, therefore, how well I will adjust to this new model of reading, and whether, even if I become a better reader in some ways, whether I will become a worse one in others."

"I’ve had the big paperback version for a while, and I was expecting to read that. I got myself a bookmark, and then stuck a Post-it note in the endnotes for rapid reference; I even printed out a list of significant characters and taped it to the inside back cover. I sharpened my pencils, and then plunged in.<br />
<br />
But darn, that book is big and awkward. Also, it has a lot of words per page, and per line — understandable, given the novel’s length, but not ideal for readability. And then I started thinking that I might want to blog about it, and in that case, being able to access underlined passages online for quick & easy copying & pasting would be a large plus. . . .<br />
<br />
So I bought the Kindle version. All the above problems solved . . . but . . ."

"Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing."

"As I say, we all know the stereotype of the Christian homeschooling parent, and of course stereotypes arise for a reason; but I wonder how many people there are out there like us, people who got into homeschooling through unexpected contingency, not because they have some kind of principled objection to secularists corrupting their children. Maybe there are more such people than we suspect." [An intesting comment thread follows.]

"As some of you know, my wife and I teach our son Wes at home, mostly, which means that each summer we have to spend a good deal of time planning what we’re going to do in the coming year. He’s headed into the eleventh grade, and while his education so far has given him a sound overview of Western cultural history, we’re concerned that he hasn’t had enough experience digging deeply into particular issues, doing wide-ranging research and coming up with sophisticated theses based on what he has learned. So we’ve decided to organize the coming school year around particular topics with interdisciplinary facets to them, starting in each case with one or two books that will in different ways orient him to the issues. Our focus will be on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West, though any non-Western topics could reach back farther."