Alan Jacobs

see more here

There are two reasons, basically, why soccer lends itself to spectatorial boredom. One is that the game is mercilessly hard to play at a high level. (You know, what with the whole “maneuver a small ball via precisely coordinated spontaneous group movement with 10 other people on a huge field while 11 guys try to knock it away from you, and oh, by the way, you can’t use your arms and hands” element.) The other is that the gameplay almost never stops — it’s a near-continuous flow for 45-plus minutes at a stretch, with only very occasional resets. Combine those two factors and you have a game that’s uniquely adapted for long periods of play where, say, the first team’s winger goes airborne to bring down a goal kick, but he jumps a little too soon, so the ball kind of kachunks off one side of his face, then the second team’s fullback gets control of it, and he sees his attacking midfielder lurking unmarked in the center of the pitch, so he kludges the ball 20 yards upfield, but by the time it gets there the first team’s holding midfielder has already closed him down and gone in for a rough tackle, and while the first team’s attacking midfielder is rolling around on the ground the second team’s right back runs onto the loose ball, only he’s being harassed by two defenders, so he tries to knock it ahead and slip through them, but one of them gets a foot to it, so the ball sproings up in the air … etc., etc., etc. Both teams have carefully worked-out tactical plans that influence everything they’re trying to do. But the gameplay is so relentless that it can’t help but go through these periodic bouts of semi-decomposition.

But — and here’s the obvious answer to the “Why are we doing this?” question — those same two qualities, difficulty and fluidity, also mean that soccer is uniquely adapted to produce moments of awesome visual beauty.

I doubt that humility is among the first traits most people think of when they think of scientists. And indeed, some scientists (like some academics and intellectuals generally) exhibit a combination of confidence in their own intellect and limitations in their social skills that makes them seem abrasive if not arrogant. A few have made a public career of intellectual overreaching, not least in matters of science and faith. But in my experience (and certainly, let me stress, in the case of my own wife!) this is much more the exception than the rule. If intellectual humility is essentially a willingness to admit what you do not and cannot know, science cultivates humility like few other pursuits can — because in few other pursuits do you so often find out that you were wrong.

though we tell the story of science through its high points — the discoveries and confirmed theories that won Nobel Prizes and launched new eras in technology — the actual practice of science, for nearly every working scientist, involves far more failure than success. This is especially true for experimental science, the kind that requires the most direct interaction with recalcitrant reality. On most days, in most labs, the data do not add up, Matlab has an untraceable bug, the laser is on the fritz, and all the cultures have been contaminated when the undergraduate research assistant sneezed. And while each of these everyday setbacks requires immense amounts of patience and persistence to overcome, they are only the quotidian version of the perplexity that begins early in the study of science. Every scientist, in the process of their training, has had to repeatedly discover that their intuitions about the world are simply wrong, or at least incomplete. Even great scientists have come up against the sheer oddity and unpredictability of the world — Albert Einstein, for example, never fully accepted the uncertainty at the heart of quantum mechanics, something that is now universally accepted by physicists.

the Athelstan Psalter

This is the Shoal Creek Valley in northern Alabama, a few hundred yards from my sister’s house, eight months after a massive tornado cut through the area. Note that the formerly thick green ridgeline is now largely a pile of matchsticks. As my brother-in-law said to me the other day, “It’ll be beautiful again. Just not in my lifetime.”

The system the judges upheld had its roots in feudalism. Edward I, one of England’s most barbarous kings, introduced the crime of scandalum magnatum while he colonised Wales, hammered the Scots and expelled the Jews. “Henceforth none be so hardy to tell or publish any false News or Tales, whereby Discord, or Occasion of Discord or Slander may grow between the King and his People, or the great Men of the Realm,” Edward declared in the Statute of Westminster of 1275. Although the statute fell into disuse, and was overtaken by the libel law that the Star Chamber used in the 1630s, an element of the feudal concern to defend the mighty remains in English libel law and the laws of many former British colonies.

Contrary to natural justice and common law, the burden of proof is on the defendant. Once a claimant has shown that the words in question are likely to provoke hatred, ridicule or contempt, the alleged libeller has to prove that what he or she has written is true or a fair comment based on true information. English libel law, and the laws of Scotland, Ireland and all the former British colonies that take it as its guide, works on the assumption that a gentleman’s word is his bond and that anyone who impugns his honour must prove his case.

These are the kinds of issues publishers of electronic textbooks have to address. These are the reasons the barriers to entry are so large. How will Apple route around them — or rise to meet them? Since the publication of Isaacson’s biography, readers have seen Jobs the visionary, Jobs the jerk, Jobs the gleaner of others’ technologies, and Jobs the editor of his own devices. What’s usually missed, and what is so triumphantly on display in his 1996 Wired interview, is Jobs the pessimist. Jobs was brilliant at identifying problems and knowing when there might be a solution Apple might provide — and knowing when the problems were such that there would never be a way out. Nevertheless, he was equally brilliant at knowing when his pessimism had been proven wrong. After all, in 2008, he famously panned Amazon’s Kindle: “The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read any more.” Now that Amazon is one of Apple’s top competitors, Apple knows that despite its problems, publishing and education are still worth taking seriously.

Stressing out too much about opposition often leads you to miss out on allies who substantively agree with everything you have to say but who work on a completely different subject, in a different medium, or in a different context. So, for example, the digital humanists who believe strongly in the potential of information technology to commingle public, ‘amateur’ and scholarly productions of history, or to circulate scholarly knowledge in new ways, shouldn’t overlook other clusters of scholars who’ve been laboring to accomplish the same things without digital technologies.

When you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.

Since the publication of my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a number of people have asked me about my history as a reader: what I read when I was younger, how my reading shaped my own development, and so on. They are sometimes surprised to learn that almost all of my reading, before my college years, involved science (especially astronomy) and science fiction. In transforming myself into a literary reader — so literary that I became an English professor — I was in many ways making quite a break with my readerly past.

But in the last decade or so I have found myself gradually shifting back towards those early interests. I haven’t ceased to be a literary reader, by any means, but my old attractions to science and technology, and to fictions that explore science and technology, have reasserted themselves.

So largely in order to make sense of this matter for myself, I wrote an essay — a brief reader’s memoir — about my shifting allegiances. I think the story is worth reading not because I am especially interesting but because it makes a few valuable points about the shaping power of our early reading experiences, and about the relations between what C. P. Snow famously called “The Two Cultures” of the sciences and the humanities.

The essay is about 12,000 words long. It’s called “Reverting to Type: a Reader’s Story,” and you can get it only as a Kindle edition here. I hope you enjoy it.