Tag: Print/Screen

From Slate to Silicon?

Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony ...

Physical Books, Digital Lives

“On or around December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously said, “human character changed.” If my memories of December 2010 serve, that’s when social media ...

Reading with Strangers

On a visit to Bogotá in 2006, riding on the then new TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, I discovered that it sponsored Libro al Viento (Books on the Wind), a series of free publications ...

Digital Lies, Real Ghosts

We’ve all obsessed over someone who isn’t there: fictional characters, an absent lover, the dead. The verb “obsess” means to haunt, harass, or torment, as an evil spirit. But we are usually the ...

The Material Life of Criticism

Three new histories of literary study draw attention to the critic’s material life. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, by Joseph North, Paraliterary ...

Reading as Inoculation

Filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith has a few books to recommend. Her Human_3.0 Reading List, on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago through October 29, contains 57 drawings ...