People in Ohio are very, very worked up about OSU football coach Jim Tressel's resignation. →
Why is it, again, that OSU and other institutions supposedly devoted to “higher education” are in the business of operating extremely resource-intensive athletics programs made possible by exploiting the egos of — and disregarding, for the most part, the “educational” interests of — “student athletes,” most of whom have no hope of playing professional ball? Money, obviously, and probably something like “prestige.” (Non-Ohio people, you’d be amazed — or, rather, you probably wouldn’t be — at how OSU athletics is simultaneously packaged and sold by the pound, in the form of scarlet and gray shirts and foam fingers and grilling equipment, and swathed in a transcendental and occasionally straight-up Christian mythos of Tradition and Honor.)
Is it possible to dial back these sprawling apparati? If OSU President Gordon Gee’s successor approaches a press conference microphone and clears his or her throat and says that maybe, you know, this sort of athletics program isn’t really in keeping with the university’s academic mission, which really does rest upon certain values and traditions — how quickly will he or she be driven, with scathing talk radio commentary and maybe even actual pitchforks, straight out of town?
Ebooks, you’re doing it wrong
After having read several ebooks in the very popular and enthusiastically marketed Kindle and iBook formats, I can vouch for the claim that ebook typography is terrible. Dashes do indeed become hyphens. Section headings are indeed stripped of their boldfacedness. Etc. These are minor irritants, yes. The world has more pressing concerns. But ebooks, while less expensive than their paper and ink counterparts, still aren’t cheap, and it’s obnoxious to pay twelve bucks for something, crack it open — “crack it open” — and find mistakes that could have been corrected by a Knopf intern taught how to make regular text bold.
Another example. I have not examined a physical copy of Alan Brinkley’s The Publisher, but I would bet that, in the middle of chapter 5, one will find the 20 or so glossy pages of captioned photographs that one often finds bound in the center of history books. Because for no good reason at all, that — right there in the middle of the chapter, between two adjacent paragraphs — is where they appear in the ebook.
With a little effort, the makers of The Publisher’s digital incarnation could have one-upped the printed book by positioning these photographs to accompany relevant bits of Brinkley’s text, illustrating, e.g., a description of Henry Luce’s childhood with a photo of Luce as a toddler. You can’t do that sort of thing in an old-fashioned book book, where the difficulties of using glossy paper (the cost, the positioning of glossy pages in arbitrary spots throughout the text) sink the whole prospect. You can get that fancy — “fancy”; this is simple stuff — in an ebook.
But no. The people behind The Publisher didn’t take the time. They didn’t even move these photo pages out of chapter 5 to, say, their own section at the end of the book. They just left ‘em.
It makes me wonder if people are reading over these things before they’re Kindlized or turned into iBooks.
I read a book: James Gleick’s ‘The Information’
It’s a little hard to describe what this book is about. It’s not about communications technologies, although they’re in there, from African talking drums to the Internet. It’s not strictly about information theory, although an important pioneer in that field, Claude Shannon, has something of a starring role. It’s kind of about how the former led to the latter—how technologies like the telephone helped birth a much more abstract approach to understanding the conveyance of information, one founded in mathematics and formal logic instead of, say, electrical engineering.
But The Information doesn’t limit himself to that single narrative. Gleick can’t seem to resist throwing as much trivia into his book as he was able to dig up. And so we read about the travails of the first dictionary publisher, the early drafts of Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph code, the never-actually-built-but-nevertheless-famous mechanical computing machine of the 19th-century polymath Charles Babbage.
I loved this book. I wish there was more of it.
I read a book: Clay Shirky’s ‘Here Comes Everybody’
My sense is that this book, when it first came out in 2008, was something of a big deal. It became a sacred text of social media gurus and the effusively technoutopian. In 2011, though, it’s lost some of that aura. Yeah, Wikipedia has more potential than the Encyclopedia Britannica ever did. Yeah, Twitter (which was new in 2008), allows political activists to share news with the outside world. We know.
I can’t complain, really. It’s my own fault for reading this thing three years too late. It’s a testament to Shirky’s careful argumentation that most of his analysis has held up, and it’s an indication of the staggering dynamism of our technological age that a book like this, which came out when I was a freshman in college, can seem so stale now.
If, like me, you’ve been hearing about this book for years and feeling guilty about not having read it, pick it up, give it a skim, and cross it off your list.
I read a book: Alan Brinkley’s ‘The Publisher’
This is a competently composed biography and a decent read. Brinkley, whose class on postwar America I took this past semester, has not taken any chances, formal or stylistic, with this book. It’s a straight shot, a blow-by-blow chronological story, and so the most interesting moment—the remarkable account of how Henry Luce and Brit Hadden, two 24-year-olds, founded Time magazine—comes early. The rest is, by comparison, less lively: Hadden loses interest in Time and dies suddenly, and Luce turns into something of an unlikable curmudgeon who begins to care more about conservative politics than journalistic innovation.
Still, for anyone curious about the early, headier days of the newsmagazine business, the book is worthwhile.
I’m still alive!
It’s been a busy few months for me, what with the job finding and college graduating. So forgive my neglect of this blog. It won’t happen again! (Haha! It very well might!)
Over this summer, though—this wonderfully jobless, internshipless summer—I will definitely have time to write in this space. So stay tuned! A summer full of cooking and reading and lounging around awaits, just waiting to be documented!
H.G. Wells on newspapers
“For the space of a few hours you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling papers—placards everywhere vociferating the hurried lie for the day; men and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by study-fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for father to finish—a million scattered people reading—reading headlong—or feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land.
“And then you know, wonderfully gone—gone utterly, vanished as foam might vanish upon the sand.
“Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—signifying nothing.”
The whole thing is here.
