Alan Jacobs

Bruce Herman, “Little Gidding”, oil on wood

Research has been done on how the internet affects us, but because I don’t use the internet much now, I can’t google those experts’ opinions and reproduce their wisdom here. What I can report is how being disconnected has changed the pattern of my day and my life. Take my morning: I used to turn on the computer when I got up; with two children to get ready for school, what else could one squeeze into the craze of breakfast-cooking, lunch-packing, tooth-brushing, homework-hunting, but a few minutes of surfing the internet over a becalming cup of coffee? How happily surprised I was when I was proved wrong. The five or seven minutes spent reading some publishing gossip or an acquaintance’s acquaintance retweeting a joke turned out to be just the right amount of time for a chapter of War and Peace or an intense battle in the Iliad… .

There is a downside of staying disconnected — I have accumulated too many emails, unread and unreturned; I have neglected people from time to time. I have relaxed my schedule a little, though if the internet functioned before as an addictive distraction, I now have the opposite problem: more than ever, I am addicted to reading, and the moment I have to get on to the internet I become impatient. But these symptoms, at least in my case, are happily relished.

does anything change anything?

Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritises pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardised way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.

Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.

On the wall of a long-closed station of the Paris Métro

Agnolo Bronzino, “Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View,” ca. 1542–43, Charcoal and black chalk, with stumping, highlighted with white chalk; outlines partly incised for transfer; sheet: 11 5/16 x 8 ½ in. (28.8 x 21.6 cm), Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Paris

I would offer up ‘coolly extravagant’ to describe Bronzino’s vision. Above all, it is full of urbanity, which favors presence but renders it unapproachable. To appreciate these paintings, we must also strive to remember the vastly different senses of style and formality under which Bronzino worked. In her essay 'The Strange Elizabethans,’ Virginia Woolf comments that 'the familiar letters of the time give us little help’ in understanding their private lives, noting that even there the English diplomat Henry Wotton is 'pompous and ornate and keeps us stiffly at arm’s length.’ Woolf gets it right (although, it should be said, she is hardly one to talk), and she might have added that Wotton acquired his personal brand of stiffness in Italy. There were no casual Fridays at the Renaissance court, nor were its denizens in the habit of asking, 'Can I wear shorts to the restaurant?’ Our culture is comfy like a booth at Applebee’s; the Medicis’ was like a resin torch glittering in the eyes of a reptile.

I’d guess that most organizations a generation from now will be pretty small by contemporary standards, with highly convoluted cell-like structures. Large numbers of people within the organization may not even know one another’s name, much less what colleagues spend their days doing, or the information they see on a regular basis. There will be redundant layers of security and activity, so that the loss of any one node can’t disable the whole network. Which is to say, thanks to Wikileaks, the organizations of the future will look a lot like … Wikileaks.

Via The Big Picture: A homeless child holds a candle during a street Christmas celebration at Dom Pedro Park in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 24, 2010. The event was organized by the charitable organisation Alianca da Misericordia. (REUTERS/Nacho Doce)

The best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American – their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when – like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by a nineteenth century English gentleman — there appears… a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

A little over a hundred miles northwest across another empty cornscape there hoves into view the oasis of Champaign-Urbana: an unprepossessing college town housing a library of over ten million volumes. Even the smallest of these land grant universities—the University of Vermont at Burlington, or Wyoming’s isolated campus at Laramie—can boast collections, resources, facilities, and ambitions that most ancient European establishments can only envy.