Alan Jacobs - Alan Jacobs

I am so ahead of this curve. My chief writing soundtrack for the past several years features Apollo Brown and Nujabes (among others) for the reasons noted in this piece.

→ 10:28 AM, Feb 1

Why is it that GoodNotes for iPad transcribes my handwriting quite accurately but I can’t find a single app that can transcribe at all that very same handwriting when it’s made in a paper notebook?

→ 12:15 PM, Jan 31

I love these old editions. I don’t really use them any more, but I like to take them out and look at them from time to time.

→ 11:36 AM, Jan 31

Update: PDFpen is just as good as ScannerPro at OCRing my handwriting.

→ 9:07 AM, Jan 31

Scanner Pro does an amazing job of recognizing my handwriting.

→ 8:07 PM, Jan 30

Great to see Emma Green’s profile of Jemar Tisby, who is THE REAL DEAL. (Emma is also the real deal as a reporter — there’s no better religion reporter.)

→ 6:56 PM, Jan 30

John Gruber: “I keep saying Facebook is a criminal enterprise, and I’m not exaggerating.” Yep.

→ 8:16 PM, Jan 29

January 1985: my first winter in Chicagoland, after having been raised in Alabama and spent my grad school years in Virginia. I do not yet have a winter coat, only a medium-weight jacket and a pair of inadequate gloves. I wake up in the morning and need to get to school to teach my 8am class. The temperature is minus-27 and the wind chill is minus-SEVENTY. I discover that my old beater of a car will not start. I shiver and shiver. An incredibly gracious neighbor offers to give me a jump, but when I reach under the hood to open the latch, it breaks off in my hand. So I have to sit down on the concrete and try to remove the grill with a screwdriver, in my medium-weight jacket and inadequate gloves, with the wind blowing around 25mph, so I can open the hood and get a jump and then put the grill back on and close the hood and go to work where it is extremely unlikely that the car will start when it’s time to go home which means that I’ll have to find a colleague who can give me a jump and do the whole thing with the screwdriver again. I curse and curse, and shiver some more. And though I do make it to school that day, and back home again, all day I tell myself that (a) I need a proper coat DAMMIT and (b) at the end of the school year I am headed back down South as fast as I can possibly get there. (And I did come back down South — twenty-nine years later.)

→ 11:44 AM, Jan 29

Working on Lucretius, Plutarch, Charles Taylor — and being reminded of how blessed I am to read and think for a living.

→ 10:48 AM, Jan 29

Churchill, when he first assumed a place as Cabinet minister, found himself “assailed by worries,” and discovered that the best way to deal with them was “to write down on a piece of paper all the various matters which are troubling one, from which it will appear that some are merely trivial, some are irremediable, and there are thus only one or two on which one need concentrate one’s energies.” Very good advice!

→ 7:07 PM, Jan 28

I’m agnostic (😉) about Bible literacy classes in schools, but I’d be enthusiastically supportive of offering such classes to journalists and academics.

→ 5:27 PM, Jan 28

I can’t really enjoy sitting outside in short sleeves because I know that in 48 hours my son in Chicago will be in mortal danger from polar cold. Therefore, he should move back to Texas.

→ 1:36 PM, Jan 28

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered:

While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.

→ 6:58 PM, Jan 27

I’ve read this book and it’s fantastic. Austin keeps going from strength to strength.

→ 7:09 PM, Jan 26

I love this idea. Apple buying DuckDuckGo would be a win for all of us.

→ 8:34 AM, Jan 26

This makes me long for a list of Journalists Who Are Not on Twitter. I’d like to read them and them only. (Well, there may be one or two exceptions.)

→ 5:43 PM, Jan 23