Alan Jacobs

At the onset of the recession, newsstand sales [of Harper’s] dropped sharply. Revenues from print ads, already flagging, continued to diminish. So did payroll, which was small to begin with—one reason why the staff skews young. A senior editor in 2010 was earning what a senior editor had earned a decade before, already below industry standards. There were no retirement benefits. Or dental. The standard dollar-a-word rate we paid outside writers, likewise, remained stagnant, unadjusted for inflation. And the staff was being downsized—and there was downsourcing, with more responsibility being pushed on to unpaid interns and junior staffers who could be rewarded with titular promotions rather than compensation.

In early 2010, declaring a fiscal emergency, MacArthur took what seemed like desperate as well as drastic measures. He fired the editor-in-chief without warning, hired a new cover designer (at added cost; it used to be designed in-house), announced yet another freeze on cost-of-living adjustments, asked fewer (and younger) people to work longer hours, and responded to questions and objections and even sometimes to politely worded suggestions with the sort of contempt for the editors on his staff that he has now displayed for them on your Web site.

Finally, when travelers actually disembark, they are too often subjected to inaccurate lessons in American manners and common sense. Americans may be surprised by the conclusions of a 2006 survey by the U.S. Travel Association, which found that foreign travelers were more afraid of United States immigration officials than of terrorism or crime. They rated America’s borders by far the least welcoming in the world. Two-thirds feared being detained for “minor mistakes or misstatements.”

mwfrost:

(via Mattias Inks: the Soane museum)

It really looks like this. A strange and wonderful place to visit.

60ansdevadrouille:

Rapa Nui (Ile de Pâques), le moai Tukuriti. Statue isolée au flanc du volcan qui servait de carrière. 2001.

If we had to visualise this [literary] establishment, it would resemble an Edwardian board of aesthetic censors presided over by a stern TS Eliot–type figure inherently hostile to innovation (the irony, of course, is that Eliot was the greatest revolutionary in modern poetry) and keeping a perpetually wary eye on the likes of a Terry Eagleton or a James Kelman. It is often said to be London-centric, dominated by white males who had the privilege of attending the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge. One of these Oxbridge-educated London-dwellers enjoyed the privilege of interviewing Kelman on stage in 1987. The occasion was the publication of Kelman’s Greyhound for Breakfast, before the Booker-winning How Late It Was How Late. When I asked Kelman about his literary standing, he claimed he had been ‘marginalised’. But, I responded timidly, his book had been enthusiastically and widely reviewed – and he was speaking to a packed and doting audience at the ICA. Yes, he snapped, 'I’ve been colonised.’ A superbly balanced answer in the way Linford Christie was famously described as well-balanced by Derek Redmond: because he had a chip on both shoulders.

Certainly, when England concede twice as many penalties as France and score triple the number of tries then it is the sort of tampering with the natural order of the universe that in Shakespeare would be followed immediately by a tumult of weirdness featuring hurricanes, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, women dressing up as boys and the audience laughing at unfunny jokes to prove how clever they are.

There is another significant layer, which complicates the ethics of data and power. The data all of these firms collect is proprietary and closed. Analysis of human behavior from the greatest trove of data ever collected is limited to questions of how best to harvest clicks and turn a profit. Not that there is no merit to this, but only these private companies and the select few researchers they bless can study these phenomena at scale. Thus, industry outpaces academia, and the people building and implementing persuasive technologies know much more than the critics . The result is a fundamental information asymmetry. The data collectors have more information than those they are they are collecting the data from; the persuaders more power than the persuaded.

Judging whether this is good or bad depends on your framework for evaluating corporate behavior and the extent to which you trust the market as a force to prevent abuse. To be sure, there is a desire for the services that these companies offer and they are meeting a legitimate market demand. However, in a sector filled with large oligopolistic firms bolstered by network effects and opaque terms of service agreements laden with fine-print, there are legitimate reasons to question the efficacy of the market as a regulator of these issues.

The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, modeled their revolutionary search engine on the citational logic of the footnote and thus transposed many of its assumptions about knowledge and technology into a digital medium. Google “organizes the world’s information,” as their motto goes, by modeling the hyperlink structure inherent in the document-based Web; that is, it produces search results based on all of the pointing between digital texts that hyperlinks do. Taking advantage of the enormous scaling power afforded by digitization, Google, however, takes this citational logic to both a conceptual and practical extreme. Whereas the footnotes in Enlightenment texts were always bound to particular pages, Google uses each hyperlink as a data point for its algorithms and creates a digitized map of all possible links among documents.

Page and Brin started from the insight that the web “was loosely based on the premise of citation and annotation—after all, what is a link but a citation, and what was the text describing that link but annotation.”29 Page himself saw this citational logic as the key to modeling the Web’s own structure. Modern academic citation is simply the practice of pointing to other people’s work—very much like the footnote. As we saw with Enlightenment journals, a citation not only lists important information about another work, but also confers authority on that work: “the process of citing others confers their rank and authority upon you—a key concept that informs the way Google works.”

There will be no new print editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica—Wikipedia will have to carry us from here on—and one of the losses that came with the news is environmental. I don’t mean trees and paper, but those enticing nearby entries on the page of a dictionary or encyclopedia that lay close to the word or topic you were looking up, and delightfully drew you away from your term-paper or mid-essay task: “Shakers” just above “Shakespeare,” “Ship” across from “Shiloh.” Your “Lepanto, Battle of” lay naked in the sheets between “Leonardo” and “Lepidoptera,” and there went a whole morning. Digital information is a lot quicker but less broadening. Less fun.

theatlantic:

The E-Reader of 1935