Alan Jacobs

The Superior Formatting Publishing version isn’t a Barnes and Noble book, so this isn’t the work of a rogue Nook marketer from B&N. Rather, it’s likely that Superior Formatting Publishing ported its Kindle version of War and Peace over to the Nook — doing a search and replace to make sure that any Kindle references they’d inserted, such as in the advertising at the end of the book about their fine Kindle products, were simply changed to Nook.

The unwitting hilarity of a publisher doing a “find and replace” and accidentally changing the text of a canonical work of Western thought is alarming. Many versions of e-books are from similar outfits, that distribute public domain works formatted for Kindle or Nook at the lowest possible prices. The great democratizing factor of the ebook formats – that anyone can easily distribute – can also mean that readers can never be quite sure that they are viewing the texts as the author intended.

The other key disruptor is empathy. Probably every company would say they try to understand their customer — and that they’ve done the market research to prove it! — but what I’m talking about in this context is a bit more subtle, it’s a combination of respect and emotional intelligence (i.e. the ability to recognize and relate to the feelings of another person) that enables you to create truly amazing user experiences. (Instagram is a good example of a company that soared ahead of its competition with a better designed, empathy-driven product.) I just don’t think it’s possible to build an amazing product or app or whatever without being able to empathize with and understand the person who is supposed to be using it. On some fundamental level great design is able to get into the mindset of a user and anticipate, guide, and delight. None of that is possible without empathy.

Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances. Stott’s response to the riots has been unpopular with many of his countrymen. Unlike Zimbardo, who would respond—and indeed has responded over the years—to incidents of group misbehavior by speaking darkly of moral breakdown, Stott brings the focus back to the long history of societal slights, usually by police, that primed so many young people to riot in the first place.

Meeting Stott in person, one can see how he’s been able to blend in with soccer fans over the years. He’s a stocky guy, with a likably craggy face and a nose that looks suspiciously like it’s been broken a few times. When asked why the recent riots happened, his answers always come back to poor policing—particularly in Tottenham, where questions over the death of a young man went unaddressed by police for days and where the subsequent protest was met with arbitrary violence. Stott singles out one moment when police seemed to handle a young woman roughly and an image of that mistreatment was tweeted (and BBMed) throughout London’s black community and beyond. It was around then that the identity of the crowd shifted, decisively, to outright combat against the police.

As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it. Your faux TED talk is not going well for you if you are making some point about “curation” replacing “creation” because, well, for starters, “curation” is choosing among things that are created? So like there’s nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it’s also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You’re in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-grade collector, not a curator. You’re buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling—and you’re then reselling it on your blog. You’re nothing but a secondary market for someone else’s work.

I rest my case.

Having received some interesting feedback on my previous post about academic life, I’m going to say a few more things about academic time-management, in a things-I-have-learned-in-a-long-life sort of way:

1. I know this is obvious, but I have to say it: you’re never going to write much if you don’t insulate yourself from distractions. I have enough self-discipline now that I don’t have to get off the internet or shut down my Twitter and email clients, but I set those clients so that they don’t give me any notifications. That gives me a chance to get absorbed in my writing enough that I forget that they’re open. YMMV, but do what you have to do to write without interruption. Also, remember that it’s really hard for most people to write for more than about four hours a day: if during those four hours you’re really focused, you’ll have made significant progress, and then can do other ancillary work in a more leisurely way. Thomas Mann, one of the most prolific of great writers, wrote one page a day. But he did it every day.

2. In writing, it helps to have more than one project: one that’s your chief occupation, and one to turn to when Project 1 grinds to a halt, as it sometimes, inevitably, will do. The longer you work as a writer, the better you’ll get at knowing when you’re just not able to make progress on a particular task and need to turn to others in order to give your mind a change of pace. This works especially well if your secondary project uses different parts of your brain than your main one. In writing more than in anything else I know, a change is as good as a rest.

3. Take the time to experiment with different workflows and different software until you find a combination of tools that rhyme with the way your mind works. If using Word constantly frustrates you, don’t continue to use it just because you’ve always used it and think you don’t have the time to learn something else. That’s a false economy. About ten years ago I started writing in a text editor (BBEdit) instead of a word processor, and then more recently learned LaTeX. The elegance, precision, and feature-appropriateness of those apps have rewarded me more than amply for the time it took me to learn to use them well.

4. Many academics are control freaks, and one of the most common ways that freakery manifests itself is in over-preparation for classes. That’s bad in a couple of ways. First, you spend more time than you can really afford, and second, once you’ve spent all that time you want to make sure that you squeeze it all in to your class time. So you end up talking more than you should, talking too fast, and shutting down potentially interesting conversations because you’re afraid that you won’t be able to cover everything you’ve prepared for. Over-preparation is thus not only time-consuming but has many bad pedagogical side-effects. You’ll do real damage to the classroom environment if you think getting through your outline is more important that allowing the students to pursue an issue that really fascinates them and gets them involved. Invest less time in traditional course prep and more time in thinking about how to manage the time in the classroom that increases student involvement.

5. Many academics, in the humanities anyway, also over-comment on their students’ essays, and end up giving far more feedback than the students can absorb, even when they want to, which is not that often. If you write dozens of marginal comments and a page or more of summary comments, students will rarely be able to differentiate between the major issues and the minor ones. You need to make comments only about major things, and let the little ones go. In that way you’ll give your students feedback that they can actually use.

6. Also: I ask my students to give me, by email, a proposal two weeks before the essay is due. I tell them what I think is good about their idea and what they need to watch out for; more often than not I advise them to take only a part of their topic and focus on that. Then, a week later, I have them send me, again by email, a rough draft. Once more I comment briefly with encouragements, warnings, and indications of where they should invest their major energies. This process would be valuable to them even if I gave no comments at all, because it makes them think about their work well in advance of the due date, which gives them the chance to turn ideas over. By the time they turn in a final version, I don’t have to make many comments at all: those who put in the work will have improved significantly, and the others will already know what their problems are. I spend less time that I would have spent in writing extensive comments; I spread that labor out over a longer period, thus making it feel less onerous; and I get better results.

Just a few recommendations, I know, but you’d be surprised — or at least, I have been surprised — by how much of a difference they make in the use of my time.

Facebook appears to be deliberately and systematically making it harder and harder for people to vary their self-presentations according to audience. I think that this broad tendency (if it continues and spreads) impoverishes public life. Certainly, the self that I present on this blog is very different from the self that I present in private life (I’m a lot more combative, for better or worse, in electronically mediated exchanges, than I am in person). It’s also very different from the self that I present on the political science blog that I contribute to. Both differ drastically from the self I present to my students. I don’t think I’m unique in this. And one of the things I like about the Internets is that I can present myself in different ways. This isn’t the result of a lack of integrity – you need to present different ‘selves’ if you want to engage in different kinds of dialogue.

Apple meanwhile has a P/E ratio of 14. The S&P 500 has a ratio of 21. According to finance 101, P/E is a measure of expected growth. What it means is the market is telling us that it expects Apple—a company that grew 70% last year and is wallopping the competition in gigantic markets where it’s just getting started—to grow much slower than the average of the biggest (ie slowest growing) companies in America.

We’ve been spending the past few months debating whether there’s a “tech bubble.” This debate got us so irritated, because it’s so indisputable that there’s no tech bubble, that we wrote an exhaustive 6,600 word post about it.

But it occurs to us that the bubble debate is a sideshow, or rather just a manifestation of something much broader and real, and it’s that everybody hates tech.

Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn’t register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he encounters — straight to the things, characters, ideas, images and emotions they conjure. A good speller, by contrast — the kind who never fails to clock the idiosyncratic orthography of “algorithm” or “Albert Pujols” — tends to see language as a system. Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage.

paleofuture:

In the 1930s some had hopes that TV would be a great new tool for universities.