Alan Jacobs

Specimen sheet

maps from Geographicus

Again, it seems to me that the increasing focus on the neurological aspects of reading leads researchers and cultural critics to fetishize the act of reading itself rather than to focus on the question of what this reading is for. For instance, discourse producers have always faced the question of what to skim and what to read deeply. If the rise of the Web has increased the magnitude of this problem for them, then has their output (journalistic and scholarly articles, reports, essays, etc.) significantly diminished in quality? Even though this question is too broad to be answered in any meaningful way, it could be broken up into smaller, more empirically tractable parts (say, by looking at only journalistic output or the scholarly output of historians). For lay-people, the research questions are even harder to frame. If there is a shift in leisure reading from a deep-reading of long-form books to a depth-focused reading of short-form web-pieces, what are its implications exactly? Concerns that this may make us less “thoughtful” are too broad and frankly, too elitist, to mean much. A better research question could be: does this shift from long-form books to more short-form web content focusing on politics and current affairs make us more politically conscious? Cass Sunstein and others have speculated that the internet with its tendency to exacerbate homophily (i.e. the tendency of people to talk to people who are similar to them in some respects) may increase the political polarization of the electorate. However, empirical work on this topic is still inconclusive. We need to develop further research questions on similar lines rather than simply thinking about deep reading/skimming dichotomy in isolation.

A long time ago an extraordinary family lived in Cappadocia. They were orthodox Christians during a period when it could be hard to be a Christian at all, because of official prohibitions and persecutions sponsored by the Roman emperor; later, when the emperor was a Christian but an Arian, they maintained Trinitarian orthodoxy against him. When the Emperor of the eastern half of the Empire came to one of them, Basil, the bishop of Caesarea, to remonstrate with him and order him to support the Arian position, he was bluntly refused. When the emperor expressed incredulity, Basil replied, “Maybe you’ve never met a real bishop before.”

Basil and his brothers and sister built what may have been the first hospital, and opened it to the poor of Cappadocia. They took in women who had been abandoned by their husbands or ignored by their families after being widowed; they took in abandoned children. They offered to take and raise children who otherwise would have been aborted or killed soon after birth. They comforted the dying who otherwise would have died alone.

When there was a great famine in Cappadocia, Basil sold much of his land and used the proceeds to feed the hungry. He excoriated the rich of his congregation for failing to do likewise. When the people of his congregation professed skepticism that they could do anything to avert the famine, Basil told them what they should say: “Offhand, I would say, ‘I shall fill the souls of the hungry. I shall open my barns and I shall send for all who are in want. I shall be like Joseph in proclaiming the love of my fellow human being.’”

One of his brothers, a monk, devoted himself for years to hunting, not for sport, but in order to provide food for the elderly poor. Another brother, a bishop, joined Basil in repudiating the rich who were willing to provide help to their fellow Christians but refused it to the Cappadocian Jews. The food was to go to all in need. In times of particular stress, Basil was known to set aside his bishop’s robes, put on an apron, and work in the kitchens.

These people followed Jesus. To them, true doctrine and faithful obedience were one; there was no need to choose between them, and indeed no option to do so. They loved life, because life is God’s first and greatest gift, and they sought to nurture it everywhere they found it. They were friends to the unborn and the prisoner, the widow and the orphan, the Gentile and the Jew. They were what I want to be.

Basically, then, Europe doesn’t have the death penalty because its political systems are less democratic, or at least more insulated from populist impulses, than the U.S. government. And elites know it. Referring to France, a recent article in the UNESCO Courier noted that “action by courageous political leaders has been needed to overcome local public opinion that has remained mostly in favour of the death penalty.” When a 1997 poll showed that 49 percent of Swedes wanted the death penalty reinstated, the country’s justice minister told a reporter: “They don’t really want the death penalty; they are objecting to the increasing violence. I see this as a call to politicians and the justice system to do more.“

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and unimportant.

Oops.

Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.

Today’s largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

Today’s dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple’s iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content. Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue from 2% in 2004.

He [Derek Parfit] decided to study philosophy. He attended a lecture by a Continental philosopher that addressed some important subject such as suicide or the meaning of life, but he couldn’t understand any of it. He went to hear an analytic philosopher who spoke on a trivial topic but was quite lucid. He wondered whether it was more likely that Continental philosophers would become more lucid or analytic philosophers less trivial. He decided that the second was more likely, and returned to Oxford.

Why did a figure such as Leibniz fail to use his own tools? Perhaps messiness was the source of his creativity. This is a fact of intellectual originality with which Google must still grapple—libraries, after all, allow for the type of manageable disorder which is often the spark of creativity. Or maybe Leibniz resisted the very order of things, over which his calculus gave him a unique mastery. If anything, the rejection of systematized information handling methods could be as common as their adoption.

Everyone but the Tea Partiers supports green technology — Republican, Democrat and independent alike. But Americans need to be leveled with. Green energy isn’t a jobs program or even an environmental policy. It’s insurance against fossil fuel price spikes and climate change. The president should remind people that stopping global warming isn’t about nature or “saving the planet.” Some set of plants and animals will survive. Human infrastructure is what’s in danger. We’ve built cities predicated on one climate and now those places have a new one. Climactic chaos is expensive.

Obama should have said: We support clean energy because we value the America we’ve built, and we’re going to fight to save and improve it through this country’s innovations. That could have been a generational challenge for an America lacking a sense of its own future — as sorely as it is lacking jobs.

For proof, he points to results from a survey prepared for CEOs for Cities, a Chicago-based U.S. network of urban leaders. The survey involved 1,000 college-educated people aged 25 to 34, and it found that two-thirds of respondents decided where they wanted to live first, then went to that city and found a job afterward.

“They operate on a theory that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll just go somewhere else,” Mr. Jones says. “With my generation, it was all about, ‘Where do I want to go work for 30 years?’ That’s not at all what we’re seeing with this generation.“