Alan Jacobs

Railroad work demanded a bodily knowledge that could register the connections between machines and the physical world around them. In a story he told to show the value of a “seasoned” man, Pinkerton recounted how one day a freight that he worked while serving as brakeman on the Oregon and California was “tipping over the hill into Leland” in Oregon. They were going, Pinkerton thought, “a little too fast for a starter.” As an experienced brakeman, he liked to feel the airbrakes working when they first started down a grade. He began to pinch them up a little, setting four brakes, but with no effect. Only when the whole crew set to work on the manual brakes did they succeed in stopping the train on a flat stretch of track in Leland. The train did not feel right, and as it left Leland, Pinkerton moved from car to car, clutching each brake wheel and looking down to check the angle cocks “the valve by which the air is cut in and out on a car.” On the fourth car, he discovered “some men beating their way by riding on the bumpers between the cars. One of them had his foot on the air pipe, and in endeavoring to steady himself had completely closed the angle cock,” which disabled the braking system to that car and all the cars behind it. When the train stopped Pinkerton opened the valve and restored the braking system to the rest of the train, “[B]ut if my experience had not told me that something was wrong, and we had tipped the hill into Glendale, where we were to meet a passenger train, there might have been a different ending.

From Railroaded by Richard White

We need to remember that the great imaginative invention we now call the hospital was the result of a people, monks, who thought that even amidst the injustices of the world you could take time to be with the dying. They cared for the dying by being present even when they could not cure - a reminder that medicine is not justified by the power to heal, but by the refusal to abandon those who are sick even when there is little we can do other than to be present.

To many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.

This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements. Advocates for giving schools a major technological upgrade — which include powerful educators, Silicon Valley titans and White House appointees — say digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets.

Some backers of this idea say standardized tests, the most widely used measure of student performance, don’t capture the breadth of skills that computers can help develop. But they also concede that for now there is no better way to gauge the educational value of expensive technology investments.

“The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data,” said Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an investor in educational technology companies. When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”

I predict that in 2050, we’ll look back at the first 20 years of the web and shake our heads. The craptacular design! The hallucinogenic business models! The privacy nightmares! All because entrepreneurs convinced themselves that they couldn’t do what inventors have done for centuries: Charge people a fair price for things they want.

My short answer is “Learn code.” My long answer, I suppose, would be that one should learn to code (specifically HTML and CSS), because it’s the language of the web, and while these skills aren’t necessary for every position, team or project, the knowledge does nothing but benefit the designer. Design decisions are not only affected by the characteristics of the content being designed, but also the qualities of the format. The best way to understand the characteristics of the web is to speak its language.

Good design and good markup provide structure to content. Good markup is a fundamental part of good design: beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside. HTML and CSS give another venue to provide structure to content in the native language of the web, and learning these guides decisions by surfacing the affordances of the medium. Design decisions are affected by both the content and the format, like how a sculptor would make different decisions if she were working with clay rather than marble.

Paris, as much as I love Paris, feels to me as though it’s long since been ‘cooked.’ Its brand consists of what it is, and that can be embellished but not changed. A lack of availability of inexpensive shop-rentals is one very easily read warning sign of overcooking. I wish Manhattan condo towers could be required to have street frontage consisting of capsule micro-shops. The affordable retail slots would guarantee the rich folks upstairs interesting things to buy, interesting services, interesting food and drink, and constant market-driven turnover of same, while keeping the streetscape vital and allowing the city to do so many of the things cities do best. London, after the Olympic redo, will have fewer affordable retail slots, I imagine.

There are three extraordinary paintings at the centre of this book. One is Flight Out of Egypt (1849-50). Then there is Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-58), depicting the quarrel over the Indian Boy, which was painted for William Charles Hood at Bethlem; and The Fairy Feller, painted for George Henry Haydon, also at Bethlem. All three are crowded with figures, and all seem to bristle with occult meanings. Tromans does not offer any deep analysis of the subject matter of these paintings. Flight Out of Egypt has a huge crowd of figures at what seems like a desert oasis – to the left there is a rhythmic forest of plumed lances held by horsemen and camel riders, to the right tents and groups of Arabs (including a tambour dancer based on an image at Pompeii). There is a group in the foreground of pale-skinned people who in some ways represent the flight into Egypt – a woman with a swaddled baby, a bearded Joseph figure, a sinister child with a bow and arrow, and an even more sinister child battling a nasty goat next to a spilled water vessel. The other rhythm in the painting is repeated images of water vessels, on veiled heads, being dipped into the stream. In the very middle is a group of mailed soldiers, helmeted and red-cloaked. The central one, bejewelled and in a leopard skin, is drinking from a metal vessel that obscures his face. It is not the Israelites leaving Egypt – Moses and Aaron are nowhere to be seen. It is some sort of allegory but its meaning – to me at least – is totally obscure. Dadd held beliefs about Egyptian myths as opposed to Christian ones. It is possible that the looming sense of danger and disaster are simply part of his state of mind. He is said to have explained that chess pieces could be possessed by devils and be against you when you played.

Discovering the evolution of words is a constant pleasure. I once asked Magnus Magnusson, the late television quizmaster, if he’d managed to retain any of the million-odd pieces of information that had whizzed past him over the years on Mastermind. Very few, he said; but one was the derivation of the word “shibboleth”. It means, of course, a slogan, catchphrase or “password” beloved of a certain group, sect or political party. He’d been delighted to find (in The Oxford English Dictionary) that it was the old Hebrew word for an ear of corn; and that, according to the Bible, during the war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, it was used as a lethal password – Ephraimites pronounced it “skibboleth” rather than “shibboleth” and any hapless soldier who couldn’t say it properly was promptly executed.

Again – how pleasing to know this. It’s precisely the kind of detail you’ll find in a dictionary – and only in a paper dictionary with words on pages. There’s shibboleth, and its fascinating etymology, in the current OED, and in my 10th-edition Chambers. But if I look it up online, on www.dictionary.cambridge.org, I’m given only the definition.

The accompanying article by Lev Grossman says nothing new, though it says it nicely enough. I kinda like the image, though it significantly understates the size and shape of the typical scroll (there’s normally an umbilicus at each end — it’s not a roll of toilet paper).

First you call for an unnamed disciplinary sovereign to safeguard the traditions of the disciplinary nation. Or you harrumph that changes have taken place in your discipline and your institution without your consent, without a plebiscite. When the restoration of your treasured norms by sovereign fiat doesn’t follow, you can begin beating the O Tempora O Mores drums, and paint yourself into the margins. From there you can get a pretty clear sighting of a kingdom of unhappy exiles, the Land of Violated Traditions, and should you wish, they’ll be happy to stamp your passport and show you to the refugee camps.