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Then there are the classification errors. William Dwight Whitney’s 1891 Century Dictionary is classified as “Family & Relationships,” along with Mencken’s The American Language. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary both classified as “Antiques & Collectibles.” An edition of Moby Dick is classed under “Computers”: a biography of Mae West classified as “Religion”; The Cat Lover’s Book of Fascinating Facts falls under “Technology & Engineering.” A 1975 reprint of a classic topology text is “Didactic Poetry”; the medievalist journal Speculum is classified “Health & Fitness.”
Nate
: ?Google Maps has both increased my appetite for aerial photography and my tolerance for less-than-perfect images. Who cares if it's a little blurred or watermarked as long as you get to see whatever patch of ground you care to look at? But comes a time when something better—like this gorgeous shot of what I presume are some farm buildings, taken at the golden-lit "magic hour" of dawn or dusk—stirs a hunger-for-the-view not so easily satisfied with satellites and databases.?
Nate
: ?A response to Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Monthly article about the ways in which easy outside access to information might be changing (and weakening) the ways we think, remember, and process information. (Kevin Kelly had his own fascinating retort to Carr's article here.)?When I think about it, my ability to “read deeply and without distraction” is not impaired at all when it comes to 9,000 word articles in Harper’s or The Atlantic on, say, trends in urban crime, thick with policy analysis and statistics, or for that matter, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” It’s just when I try to read Proust, or heaven forbid, JR by William Gaddis—a novel that I greatly anticipated reading, but which quickly became a coaster for the glass of water on my bedside table.
A more important question, I think, is why our brains now seem to better tolerate nonfiction. Regarding Proust in particular, Carr’s argument is, for me, especially ironic: The way that I have found to actually read those long complex sentences is, in fact, to skim them—to ride along on the surface from one detailed, beautiful image of village life to another, without trying to unpack them too literally or rationally.
Nate
: ?A neat auto-generated chart from Google Trends ... is the downward trend suggestive that people are less interested in culture, or that, as the web becomes ever larger, people are realizing it's just too vague a search term. The yearly slumps in searches correspond to midsummer and late December, times when Americans at least are too busy with other cultural activities to spend their time googling.?