Alan Jacobs

It’s telling that Dostoyevsky, himself a Christian, offered no direct theological rebuttal to his character’s speech. The counterpoint to Ivan in “The Brothers Karamazov” is supplied by other characters’ examples of Christian love transcending suffering, not by a rhetorical justification of God’s goodness.

In this, the Russian novelist was being true to the spirit of the New Testament, which likewise seeks to establish God’s goodness through a narrative rather than an argument, a revelation of his solidarity with human struggle rather than a philosophical proof of his benevolence.

In the same way, the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today — besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow — is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains.

That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild.

The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death.

In the leafless hills of western Connecticut, this is the only Christmas spirit that could possibly matter now.

Hiding beneath all the CGI Sturm und Drang is a powerful story about what it means to have a home and, conversely, what it means to be lost. Bilbo, as he explains in the best scene in the film, loves and misses his books and his armchair and his garden back in the Shire; but in missing them he has learned their true value. And this has given him compassion for those who like the dwarves have had their home taken from them — and even for Gollum, whose most precious possession has been taken from him.

Well, okay, not really a challenge, but a longstanding wish.

My friend Matt Frost and I periodically taunt one another with reminiscences of Stikkit, a web service that debuted about six years ago and died two years after that. Few traces of Stikkit’s existence remain online; perhaps the most extensive is John Gruber’s early review.

Stikkit was a text-entry box backed by a tremendously intelligent parser that could reliably figure out whether what you were typing was a phone number, address, email address, contact name, list, or bookmark. (Stikkit could relate all these things to one another too: recognizing email addresses in lists, etc.) The great, great thing about Stikkit was that it produced structured data from unstructured input. The user typed in plain text and got back something much more. As soon as I started using it I knew that my seemingly endless quest to find a usable, flexible, and powerful organizational system had come to a satisfying conclusion.

And then Stikkit’s inventor, Rael Dornfest, shut the company down and went to work for Twitter. Twitter bought all the intellectual property Dornfest had developed for Stikkit and, as far as I can tell, used absolutely none of it.

Nothing like Stikkit has appeared since 2008. That needs to change.

Here’s a thought: several years before Dornfest built Stikkit, Simson Garfinkel had created an alternative to Mac OS X’s Address Book called SBook, which had its own sophisticated parser. (I have sometimes wondered whether Dornfest picked up anything from Garfinkel’s earlier work.) He shut that down too, but open-sourced the code.

So how about this: Some talented programmer should start with Garfinkel’s old code and build a desktop app for the Mac that works like Stikkit. In fact, Notational Velocity is part of the way there, with its ability to recognize links and make them clickable in simple text files: maybe something could be borrowed from that, and added to. If the data can be stored in text files rather than in a database, that would make it easier to create a corresponding iOS app that could be reliably synced with the desktop version via Dropbox.

(Of course, another web service a la Stikkit would be possible too, but it’s so nice to have local copies of one’s data.)

So whaddya say, coders? Can someone make this for me?

How should the church respond to congregational decline, financial deficits, and vocational shrinkage? The answer is obvious: make ministerial selection more stringent, theological education more demanding, and spiritual formation more exacting. And burn anyone who proposes a managerial or entrepreneurial solution.

the year in volcanic activity

I used to find my sleeplessness – I usually fall off for a few hours, wake for maybe two, then sleep until morning – a cause of distress, and I have ground down more than a few teeth in gnashing protest. None of the manifold putative remedies – sheep, Bovril, breathing or visualisation exercises – have ever helped. I used to find this infuriating, and would stew in the dark next to my wife (who falls asleep in two minutes) exhorting myself: “Sleep! Sleep!”

This injunction, of course, makes things worse. Eventually it works, mostly because it is exhausting to chant inwardly for hours on end, desperate to drop off. But what a telling mismetaphor that is! Drop off what? The edge of a cliff? It’s hardly a wonder one resists doing it, it’s dangerous.

Often I would get up and write, which is a near-perfect remedy for sleep. But I have recently come to accept what I thought of as a malady, and to embrace it as a boon. The reason for this is my Kindle. Until I had one, I would turn on the lamp by the side of my bed, which could awaken even the soundly sleeping Belinda, who would inquire how long I intended to keep it on, and her awake? But my Kindle has a cutesy little light that protrudes from the leather cover like some bit of a praying mantis, and which now allows me to read without causing distress to my loved one. And this, I find, is absolutely dandy. Looked at coolly, I have not only extended my day by a couple of hours, but created a time in which the only thing I can do is read.

Invaluable.

some assembly required

Not being able to share photos seamlessly from one social network to another may be the epitome of a “first world problem;” getting lost in the Australian outback because your smartphone manufacturer replaced a bulletproof mapping app with its inferior homemade version is a bit more serious. But in either case, the essential value of these information technologies–their ability to seamlessly interface with each other as only bits, rather than atoms, can–is being purposely eroded. The vision is almost comically retrograde: Twitter, Google, Apple, and Facebook each seem to think that they can provide every conceivable digital functionality to the user all on their own at each other’s expense, much like GM’s “kitchen of tomorrow” at the 1964 World’s Fair promised to meet every need of a 20th-century housewife with one brand. Fifty years later, nobody has (or wants) a kitchen built solely out of General Motors products. So why do Twitter and Facebook act like there is a personal information-technology equivalent?

Another purported quality of Coursera is that it is “open”, as everything must now be. The cyber-credo of “open” sounds so liberal and friendly that it is easy to miss its remarkable hypocrisy. The big technology companies that are the cybertheorists’ beloved exemplars of the coming world order are anything but open. Google doesn’t publish its search algorithm; Apple is notoriously secretive about its product plans; Facebook routinely changes its users’ privacy options. Apple, Google and Amazon are all frantically building proprietary “walled-garden” content utopias for profit.

“Open-source” software, on the model of the Linux operating system, used to be the cyber-theorists’ favourite example of why open would always beat closed. Yet, for all the admirable successes of open-source software (especially in industrial applications), closed commercial software and services still dominate. Even Google’s open-source Android smartphone operating system is, for the vast majority of customers, experienced as a customised and re-closed version on phones manufactured by Samsung, HTC and Sony.

“Owning pipelines, people, products or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success,” Jarvis wrote in 2009. “Openness is.” What is now the company with the highest market valuation on earth? Apple, which sells physical products, jealously guards its patent hoard and is about as “open” as Fort Knox. Only the most black-hearted of cynics could suppose that it is in a cybertheorist’s interest to lecture media companies that they must be “open” so that the technology companies for which he acts as a useful idiot can happily hoover up all their data for free and monetise it.