1. First up, education. Ross Douthat at the NYT this week wrote a thoughtful appeal for the humanities, which are in serious decline. At the top thirty colleges (according to the formidable US News rankings), the proportion of humanities majors has fallen from about a third in the early 2000s to around a fifth today. […]
Introducing the Technology Issue!
Below find the Table of Contents and Opener of our sixth issue, all about Technology. You can either subscribe directly, or sign up to be a monthly giver to Mbird, which includes a complimentary subscription to the magazine. Opener What if your entire life was recorded? Like instant-replay on Monday Night Football, what if you […]
From the Magazine: Heavy Loads in the Happy Workplace
Another look back at the Work and Play Issue. This one covering the history of happiness came from Ethan Richardson. “It wasn’t just about building a business. It was about building a lifestyle that was about delivering happiness to everyone, including ourselves.” So says Tony Hsieh, internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and CEO of Zappos.com. […]
Divine Memory and The Right to Be Forgotten
Whenever I hire my annual student intern, a part of my hiring process is a quick Google search. I’ll be working with this student for the next academic year or so, which is my excuse for scrutinizing the applicant’s web footprint for reasons to hire or not to hire. I’m told that nowadays blind dates […]
When Even Our Boredom Doesn’t Make Us Bored
A fascinating–and disturbingly convicting–article came out in The New Yorker’s Oct 28th issue called “Only Disconnect,” by Evgeny Morozov (what a name!). In it, he walks through several books and essays, past and present, that point out what we’re all seeing, that “We’re under assault by connectivity, receptivity, the tyranny of the now.” Morozov takes […]
Google Mapping the End of Man
I recently had car trouble, near midnight, still three hours away from a weekend getaway. My pickup jammered to a halt on the side of the road in Godknowswhere, South Carolina and, with my girlfriend in the passenger’s seat, it was easy to expect there was some appropriate know-how code for this kind of mishap; […]
Is Google Searching Me?
After reading this very short clip from Nicholas Carr over at NPR’s Marketplace, I immediately had to order his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. For now, I’ll suffice it to say this won’t be the only post on Carr; he’s a terrific writer of science and the brain and […]
Another Week Ends: Post-Election Meekness and Melodrama, Googlepoetics, Psychopathic Stories, DFW Exists, The Testament of Mary, Episode VII, and Skyfall
1. Definitely not the easiest week to write this column. The Interwebs, as one might have predicted, have been consumed by I-Told-You-So’s and The-End-Is-Nigh’s, neither of which are a whole lot of fun–at least not from the standpoint of grace. Who knows, maybe you found yourself staying away from screens altogether this week, biding your […]
The All-Seeing, Never-Seeing Google Goggles
And little by little, Google crafts a creature-comfort Terminator. Here’s a look into the anticipated Google Project Glass: It’s not that these probably won’t be the norm in five years–it’s that I always wanted to be the Terminator, and yet this Terminator is so lame. This Terminator is still kind of a control-freak, a hollow-bodied, […]
