Alan Jacobs

There’s a theory that technology eventually subverts whatever rational ends it’s supposed to promote. Grad Cafe seems to have been created to relieve anxiety, either by providing helpful information or just by puncturing the silence that lies between submitting an application and hearing back. Needless to say, it fails miserably. What could be more stressful than a screen full of useless data that one nonetheless feels compelled to master? What is more counterproductive than throwing a grad school applicant with no sense of perspective into an online mosh pit of other grad school applicants with no sense of perspective?

The scrum at the Grad Cafe indicates that my generation’s safe space has been transformed into just another gold ring. As the obsessive chronicle of yeses and noes reveals, the process of finding a masters or doctorate program carries with it a sense of desperation—one actually reminiscent of the job search. In this rat race, the ivory tower morphs from a reassuring backup plan into a source of social and existential terror via its mysterious admissions policies. And the manic scrutiny to which sites like the Grad Cafe submit such policies only aggravates the problem.

theatlantic:

laphamsquarterly:

Are any of these fonts your favorite? Please don’t say it’s Papyrus. 

Five hundred years of fonts, good and bad.

We heart fonts. 

Over the past few decades it seems football has gone out of its way to alienate the paunchy, middle-aged fan. Modern players are so lean and fit they look like they have been vacuum‑packed. The Premier League has become another Hollywood. Earlier this year the only hope left to us, Norwich City’s impressively bulky Grant Holt, celebrated a goal against Swansea by stripping off his shirt to reveal a body that looked like sculpted marble rather than the moulded jelly many of us were hoping for.

With Holt out of the equation and the reliably plump Adriano getting dumped by Corinthians last month, there is simply no one for the untoned spectator to identify with any more. This did not used to be the case. Once upon a time men such as Ernie Machin, Dave Mackay and Frannie Lee, all three of whom looked infinitely more likely to sink a six-pack than to own one, bestrode the pitch, while others such as Tommy “The Flying Pig” Lawrence stood between the sticks.

This, however, is not the most remarkable character of the sound of bells. This sound has a thousand secret relations with man. How oft, amid the profound tranquillity of night, has the heavy tolling of the death-bell, like the slow pulsations of an expiring heart, startled the adultress in her guilty pleasures! How often has it caught the ear of the atheist who, in his impious vigils, had perhaps the presumption to write that there is no God! The pen drops from his fingers. He hears with consternation the funeral knell which seems to say to him, And is there indeed no God? Oh, how such sounds disturbed the slumbers of our tyrants! Extraordinary religion, which, by the mere percussion of the magic metal, can change pleasures into torments, appal the atheist, and cause the dagger to drop from the hand of the assassin!

A supreme author of critically gifted prose, [Dwight] Macdonald at his dazzling best was just as open: anything produced by anyone, he would examine for its true quality. That’s what a cultural critic must do, and there are no shortcuts through theory. But deep down he knew that, or he would never have bothered to coin a phrase. Back again because they never really went away, Dwight Macdonald’s essays are a reminder that while very little critical prose is poetic, great critical prose always is: you want to say it aloud, because it fills the mouth as it fills the mind.

Why worry about what’s covered in newspapers and television when it’s possible to read firsthand accounts from Syria or Sierra Leone? Research suggests that we rarely read such accounts. My studies of online news consumption show that 95 percent of the news consumed by American Internet users is published in the United States. By this metric, the United States is less parochial than many other nations, which consume even less news published in other countries. This locality effect crosses into social media as well. A recent study of Twitter, a tool used by 400 million people around the world, showed that we’re far more likely to follow people who are physically close to us than to follow someone outside our home country’s borders, or even a few states or provinces away. Thirty-nine percent of the relationships on Twitter involve someone following the tweets of a person in the same metropolitan area. In the Twitter hotbed of São Paulo, Brazil, more than 78 percent of the relationships are local. So much for the death of distance.

From what I’ve witnessed—in the Bible, in my own life, and in the lives of those around me—an encounter with God elicits a desire to share the good news, not to say sorry for it. This is something Miller himself seems to understand, or at least he did, at one point. Blue Like Jazz the book does not end with an apology. It ends with an exhortation. “I want you to know Jesus too,” Miller writes. That’s what knowing Jesus does—it makes you want other people to know him, as well. It’s a truth as old as the Bible itself, but it’s entirely absent from Blue Like Jazz the movie. Instead of “I want you to know Jesus,” we hear, “I want you to apologize for Jesus.” It’s a message that Hollywood itself could have delivered.

The magnification of minor fluctuations and amplification of sub-acoustic distortions is what the media does best these days. It uses many new tools. The most sensitive—and most ridiculous—are those dials they put in the hands of focus-group members that allow them to register their feelings about individual words in candidates’ speeches. This results in bottom-of-the-TV-screen graph lines that continually slope up and down in a way that’s deemed crucial simply because it’s visible. Before these tiny twitches could be measured, our democratic system functioned just fine; voters’ minds were on their conscious thoughts, not on their helpless synaptic microbursts. Daily tracking polls have the same effect: they dignify static, treating it as a symphony. Break down those polls by gender, age, religion, and a hundred other categories which suggest that human beings aren’t really fit to rule themselves at all because in fact they have no selves, just bundles of circumstance-determined reflexes manipulable by precision marketing tactics (and someday direct electronic stimulation), and patterns can be discerned almost at will. Given an endless supply of evidence and a boundless desire for conclusions, the narratives can branch out to infinity.

E-books and poetry just don’t get along as well as e-books and prose. It’s those line breaks, poetry’s defining feature. The problem is a simple sounding one, but really tough to solve. Because the same e-book has to work on many different screens and devices on which readers can change the font and size of the text, it’s impossible to guarantee the line will display as the poet intended.

Of course, poetry publishers have the same problem with print books—sometimes poets’ lines are wider than a book’s trim size (take Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsberg), but there’s a convention to solve this: when a poetic line continues over the edge of a printed page, it’s indented on the next line. It’s been surprisingly hard to reliably recreate this indenting in an e-book, to make sure poems keep the integrity of their lines when they appear on screen.

We are a traditional department in most ways, and I want to continue to be so, but it is vital to remember Jaroslav Pelikan’s aphorism: ‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.’ To try to freeze a curriculum and a program of study at any given period in the (short) history of academic literary study is an exercise in traditionalism, not an expression of living tradition. We still want to celebrate the best that has been thought and said, we still want to teach close and careful reading, we still want to teach the skills of discerning research and clear, cogent writing. But our institutional context is changing; our discipline is developing; new literatures have arisen powerfully around the world, especially in the global South; our students’ intellectual preparation and educational expectations are very different than what they were twenty years ago; the technologies that we employ in reading, writing, and research have been utterly transformed. All these changes require us to think in new ways about how to express the traditions we value. Not everyone will take up this task in the same way, but if we are going to be successful in helping our students to be lifelong readers and writers, we have to give our faculty room to explore and experiment, and trust them to carry our their calling responsibly.