April 2010
5 posts
“No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and...”
– Stephen Prothero
Metaphor in design that adds real value — changing the background paper stacks to represent actual pages left in a book, for example — is arguably useful, but the mindless embrace of metaphor based on Apple’s user interface guidelines is a mistake. Especially when these metaphors yell loudly and grow old quickly — precisely the opposite goal for which great interface design strives (be quiet...
“The problem with the simplicity movement is that its proponents mistake...”
– Charlotte Allen
“There’s an excellent book titled What Jane Austen Ate and Dickens Knew...”
– Mike Loukides, contributing to a discussion on the O’Reilly Radar
“Book publishers—like executives in other media—are making the same mistake the...”
– The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books : The New Yorker
February 2010
3 posts
“If we realize this, then we may understand what Easter is and why it needs and...”
– Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent (via ayjay)
“…If there is one truth people need to learn…it is this: the...”
– Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
“The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the...”
– Thomas Merton
January 2009
2 posts
David M. Kennedy’s Great Depression Reading List -... →
December 2008
20 posts
Calvin 500 →
Read the Institutes in a year.
All the cool kids are doing it.
[ht: Meg]
Leaving Literature Behind - ChronicleReview.com →
Reading literature can change their lives — and ours. The thing is, we don’t quite understand how this process works — nor will we ever understand. Certainly we can’t predict it past a certain point. That’s why reading literature can’t be a discipline. I, a straight white American male, can see myself in a black character or a female one, understand a point made by a dead...
Digital Domain - Advertisers Face Hurdles on... →
“All brands want consumers to be their ‘friends.’ Oh, boy, do they!” But speaking for himself, he said he had reservations about the very premise. “I don’t want to be best friends with a brand,” he said. “It’s just stuff.”
[ht: Bethany]
Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and... →
[If you’re like most people, the number of people with whom you can carry on meaningful relationships is probably 148.5, give or take a few.
Unless, of course, you have a larger-than-normal neocortex.]
Fast Friends? - The Smart Set →
There is, to be sure, lemonade to be made of living next to Wendy’s. Because this one was built in the classic Wendy’s architectural style, and not in any way that acknowledged its dense urban surroundings, it has one of those greenhouse-like dining rooms with windows that look out over two streets. I’ve always found the Wendy’s solarium to be a nice touch for diners, but,...
National Weather Service Watch Warning Advisory... →
My favorite part about this weather forecast is that it contains the phrase “explosively developing low pressure system.”
Annals of Education: Most Likely to Succeed -... →
A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects...
The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell - The... →
Have you ever had the nagging sense that there’s something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell - the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? We’re here to help, dear reader.
…Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What’s he really saying? Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he’s saying that...
ayjay:
“We have a writing crisis on ours hands. Everybody in the country is writing books but only a fraction of that number is interested in reading them; while the Chinese work, we workshop. There’s no bigger folly than writing instruction displacing “literature” in college English, though this seems to be what’s happening—not because you can’t teach writing, but because there’s no point in...
Second Sunday of Advent
We wait with the people of South East Asia, of Pakistan and of New Orleans
For a time when man and earth will no longer be in conflict.
We wait with the whole of Creation
We wait in hope for the Sons of God to be revealed.
We wait with the people of Palestine, of Iraq and of Sudan
For a time when all will be free from oppression and bloodshed
We wait with the whole of Creation
We wait in...
Dickens Our Contemporary - The Atlantic
(May... →
The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 198 →
The Paris Review interviews Marilynne Robinson.
Grand Theft Auto, Twitter and Beowulf all... →
Storytelling is under assault in schools, universities and from the internet, but the power of narrative shows no sign of waning…
In Memory of Dr. William Spoelhof →
Dr. William Spoelhof, a faithful member of the Calvin College community for eight decades, passed away peacefully in his sleep at 1:45 a.m. on December 3, 2008…
Children’s Books, Lost and Found - First Things →
[Joseph Bottum on the golden age of children’s literature.]
Golden ages are not measured by their major figures, since genius comes when it comes, in or out of season. The real advantage of a golden age for a literary genre is the elevation of its second-rank authors: Merely good writers become great writers when they happen to live at the right moment. Few of these recent children’s...
Michael Dirda on 'The Best of All Possible Worlds'... →
[Is ‘this is the best of all possible worlds’ a legitimate answer to the question: ‘how can a good God allow evil in the world?’ Leibniz thought so, as do many Reformed philosophers with whom I generally agree, but Voltaire didn’t. Michael Dirda doesn’t adequately answer the question here; then again, how often do you find articles in mainstream American...
Sentimental Worship
“Sentimentality is subtle. C. S. Lewis once told a young writer: “Instead of telling us a thing is ‘terrible,’ describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was a ‘delight,’ make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (‘horrifying,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘hideous,’ ‘exquisite’) are only saying to your readers, ‘Please, will you do my job for me.’” Lewis...
Advent Prayer
[Sorry for the week-long hiatus. I’ve been out of town for Thanksgiving.]
We can scarcely believe it, God, this story of love’s birth in the world. We rationalise and reason, we read the headlines and we doubt and yet, oddly, we hope, desperately, that it just might be true.
If we’ve come here disbelieving, God unwrap our doubt to make a space for love If we’ve come here despairing ...
November 2008
18 posts
St. Olaf Wrestles With Milton's Angel, and... →
Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that would make The Lord of the Rings’ archfiend, Sauron, weep with envy! Epic battles, with angels hurling mountains at their demonic foes! This is edge-of-your-seat material.
“It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of...”
– The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla - Dick Cavett Blog - NYTimes.com
At 'Home' With the Past →
If you want to understand how different Marilynne Robinson is from other contemporary novelists — how different, in fact, from most contemporary human beings — all you need to do is walk into her dining room.
“These are my favorite books in here,” says the author of “Housekeeping,” “Gilead” and the recently published “Home” as she...
The Traffic Guru →
Monderman envisioned a dual universe. There was the “traffic world” of the highway, standardized, homogenous, made legible by simple instructions to be read at high speed. And there was the “social world,” where people lived and interacted using human signals, at human speeds. The reason he didn’t want traffic infrastructure in the center of Drachten or any number of other...
The Plan - Jack Handey: The New Yorker →
The plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen… . Most of the customers in the bank must happen to be wearing Nixon masks, so when we come in wearing our Nixon masks it doesn’t alarm anyone.
FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive »... →
Christians [in America] want to be useful in their Babylonian captivity. They follow the counsel of the prophet Jeremiah who urged the children of Israel to seek the peace of the city of their exile, for in its peace is also their peace. The great danger, then and now, is that, in being useful to the city of their exile, they forget the New Jerusalem, the city of their destination. It really is...
Does Religion Make You Nice? - Slate Magazine
... →
Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.
Google Flu Trends →
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed...
Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004... →
Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths.
Newsweek's Special Election Project →
If you followed the campaign as closely as I did, you’ll enjoy this 45,000-word recap from Newsweek:
“An inside, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential election produced by a special team of reporters working for more than a year on an embargoed basis and detached from the weekly magazine and Newsweek.com. Everything the project team learns is kept confidential until the day...
The Political Scene: The New Liberalism: Reporting... →
We Blew It - The Weekly Standard →
An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at...
Victory Speech: The New Yorker →
“Among other triumphs, last Tuesday night was a very good night for the English language.”
-James Wood on Barack Obama’s acceptance speech
“The assertion and expansion of presidential power is arguably the defining...”
– Jonathan Mahler in the NYT. This is what I’ve been saying for the last six years or so to my conservative friends: you can support this unprecedented expansion of executive power now, but then you’ll be stuck with it the next time a Democrat is in the White House — and that Democrat may not be as...
All Alone - The New York Sun →
…loneliness may have become ingrained in our culture because of the way we live and work, often in circumstances we’ve not exactly chosen. Over generations, our habits have hardened into trends we cannot uproot merely by positive thinking. One in five Americans now moves at least once a year, often to communities that do not encourage spontaneous interaction with others. We spend more...
The Turker’s Gospel →
The Turker’s Gospel is a new version of the Gospel books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, reinterpreted from the King James Version of the Bible by workers at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Workers were assigned individual Bible verses and asked to rewrite them in their own words. No context was provided. The rewritten verses were reassembled for publication on this website.
This project was...
October 2008
35 posts
Pollitis | The Trail | washingtonpost.com →
A self-respecting citizen doesn’t want to wind up in an awkward conversation like this:
Friend: Did you see the new Marist Poll?
You: Uh … not yet.
Friend: Loser.
Scientists prove it really is a thin line between... →
Scientists studying the physical nature of hate have found that some of the nervous circuits in the brain responsible for it are the same as those that are used during the feeling of romantic love…