Alan Jacobs

Again, pundits, let’s talk. MOOCs are damn interesting, you betcha, but seriously, if you think they’re about to solve the labor-intensivity of higher education tomorrow with no losses or costs in quality, you have a lot of learning to do. Not just about the costs and budgets of higher education today, but about the history of distance learning. Right now you guys sound like the same packs of enthusiastic dunderheads who thought that public-access television, national radio networks, or correspondence courses were going to make conventional universities obsolete via technological magic. And hey, if you’re that keen on the digital, skip the drinks, I’m happy to educate you via email.

But for all their supposed obsolescence, libraries remain vital places, and many of them are more crowded than ever. Printed material, however, is not always the primary draw. “Increasingly, people can use that material anywhere that they want to, which means they come to the library for other needs,” says Jim Neal, the vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University. “They come to study. They come to work together. They come to use technology they can’t carry around. They come here to consult with experts, with librarians.”

The pressure to accommodate “other needs” is especially strong at public libraries, which are increasingly taking on civic functions that far exceed the historical mission of serving books to readers. “Libraries are the new cathedrals of our society. They’re very important sanctuaries,” says the architect Bing Thom, whose new public library in Surrey, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, was designed as a space of communal engagement. “People are living in smaller and smaller spaces, so the library becomes the place you escape to for socialization, for solitude, to take a breath. It’s the last space in society that’s free. Even for the homeless. There is a sense of democracy; it is a common space we all share.”

Grammar signifies more than just a person’s ability to remember high school English. I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.

In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are “essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms.” The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings — not just computers.

And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil’s in the details. In fact, when it comes to my whole business, details are everything.

As Anthony Burgess once commented, there is no better reason for not reading a book than having it, but an exception should be made for Jacques Bonnet’s “Phantoms on the Bookshelves,” just out this month. It appears at a time when books and literature as we have known them are undergoing a great and perhaps catastrophic change. A tide is coming in and the kingdom of books, with their white pages and endpapers, their promise of solitude and discovery, is in danger, after an existence of five hundred years, of being washed away. The physical possession of a book may become of little significance. Access to it will be what matters, and when the book is closed, so to speak, it will disappear into the cyber. It will be like the genie—summonable but unreal.

Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn’t matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.

Not long ago I watched a pre-filmed online course from Yale about the New Testament. It was a very good course. The instructor was hyper-intelligent, learned and splendidly articulate. But the course wasn’t great and could never have been. There were Yale students on hand for the filming, but the class seemed addressed to no one in particular. It had an anonymous quality. In fact there was nothing you could get from that course that you couldn’t get from a good book on the subject.

A truly memorable college class, even a large one, is a collaboration between teacher and students. It’s a one-time-only event. Learning at its best is a collective enterprise, something we’ve known since Socrates. You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.

My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films. I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges’ audio track on the ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school. Film school is a complete con, because the information is there if you want it.

The other day I was urging some friends on Twitter to watch Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which I believe to be one of the greatest films yet made — maybe the very greatest. So I thought I might explain why I have such regard for it, especially since it’s such a disorienting film to watch.

In comparison to Citizen Kane, which is its chief rival in the Greatest Movie Sweepstakes, Rules might seem emotionally incoherent. Kane’s emotional register is much narrower, and moves implacably towards the film’s climax. This suits its subject, which is the disintegration of a great man. But Rules swings wildly between farce and tragedy, and covers most of the emotional territory in between. Watching it, you can often be caught laughing at things you perhaps shouldn’t be laughing at — or laughing in ways that you feel might be inappropriate. But this is all part of Renoir’s strategy.

Whether Rules is the greatest film ever made or not, surely Renoir’s screenplay is the finest example of that difficult art, because in around an hour-and-a-half it takes a wide range of characters through the heights and depths of emotion. It does this through placing them in situations which deprive them of the rules which they have used all their lives to play their social, romantic, and personal games. We all play such games and live by such rules; they govern how we understand ourselves, how we understand our intimate relations, how we understand the social order. We are incorrigibly self-dramatizing on all these levels. And when deprived of our usual rules, when thrown into what appears to be a new game — or, worse, some situation that doesn’t even seem to be a game, that has no evident rules — we flounder helplessly. We become absurd, comical. But we also veer close to the possibility of tragedy.

Through his screenplay, but also through an extraordinarily sophisticated set of cinematic compositions, showing people in an immensely complex set of visual relations to one another, Renoir exposes all the games by which these people live. Marriages are thrown into chaos, as are love affairs, individual self-images, and the whole social order which, after all, is about to immolate itself in the fires of the Second World War — as the hunting scene famously demonstrates.

At the center of it all, in a strange sort of way, is the character Renoir himself plays, Octave. Octave observes all, disrupts all. He has no clear place in society. He is at the margins of everything. He is funny, charming, appealing — but also chaotic. It’s frightening to see how little he understands of himself, and how easily he disorients others without ever meaning to. Octave reminds us — the whole film reminds us — that the games we play, and the rules we play them by, are fragile, easily disrupted. Insofar as those rules help us to avoid painful truths about ourselves and our society, we might welcome their disruption. Except that, it turns out, we don’t know how to live without them.

One final thought, about the shooting in Colorado: It’s terrible, of course. Really and truly evil. But what next? Will we have magnatometers at the cineplex the way we do at airports and some schools? I don’t know the answer to this. But I do know that if I was Hollywood this incident would scare me more than piracy and streaming and every other aspect of the digital revolution rolled up in one. If the movie-going experience becomes fraught–either with worry about psychos or the unpleasantness of a TSA-like regime–that would be biggest blow the industry has ever suffered.

I assume the smart people in the industry have already put a lot of thought into this question, especially after 9/11. But I have no idea what the good answers are, except to pray that it doesn’t happen again.

In our exciting and information-rich Internet Age, everyone needs a readflow: a way to get to the things you want or need to read, and then a way to sort through them once you’ve read them. For me, Instapaper is the key to my readflow. My system works especially well on iOS, because the key apps are all hooked to each other.

First, I figure out what I want to read via the web, my Twitter feed, and Google Reader. (On my iPad and iPhone I read my RSS feeds on Reeder; on my Mac I use NetNewsWire.) Anything that looks interesting gets sent to Instapaper.

Then, usually two or three times a day, I visit Instapaper to read all this stuff. If it’s something I want to share with others, I send it to this tumblelog; if it’s something I want to keep for future reference myself, I send it to Pinboard; and if it’s of no particular interest I send it to the trash.

So, basically, I have three inputs to Instapaper and three outputs from it. Simple, yet effective.

These new tactics go beyond Islam as a religion. They are intended to make Muslims or Arabs in government who are often far less senior than Abedin, or those in policy positions who seek a better relationship with the Islamic world, feel like outsiders. It will most surely affect the desire of those who can contribute language and cultural skills to ever work in government.

I am of Arab Christian descent. I worked for over a decade in national security as a political appointee in state and federal government, married a Jewish lawyer, and have three children. I am either exceptionally lucky or a Manchurian Mom. True, given our times, the professional and personal can often merge; with so many family members born in Lebanon, my security clearance reviews were onerous. But it seemed a small nuisance for the benefit of serving the nation.

Like so many in government now, my narrative seems typically American. And, I suspect, that is exactly the problem.