“Reading occupies a strange position in today’s world, being at once physiologically unnecessary and culturally central.”
Tag: Print/Screen
Slanting the History of Handwriting
Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident.
Reading after the University
If you want to support readers, the best hope will always be helping do away with economic compulsion and the division of labor.
The Text: Do Not Disturb
Does loving a work of literature mean seizing it? How should critics feel about their feelings toward a text?
In Praise of Search Tools
For centuries, book-makers, printers, furniture-makers and, now, programmers have worked to answer: how do you find what you need in a book?
Rereading the Revolt
In May 1381, rebels burned documents at Cambridge, then scattered the ashes to the wind. But why were universities targeted by the rebels?
What Happens When a Metaphor Becomes Real?
The humanities can reveal the truth of the world’s crises, everything from contagions like the pandemic to apocalypses like right-wing violence.
What’s in a Bookstore?
For more than five centuries, equilibrium between profit and passion has remained elusive to book buyers and sellers.
Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen ...
Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos
Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how ...
How Does Copyright Matter?
Copyright as we know it is a surprisingly recent development. It has been with us just a few decades—only as long, roughly, as Hello Kitty and the Star Wars ...
What I Learned on Medieval Twitter
Most of the people I follow on Twitter are medievalists, even though I’m not a medievalist myself. Far from it: my research focuses on the 20th and 21st ...
Newspapers and Northern Lights
In 1818 John Ross pointed the ship Isabella toward the Northwest Passage and opened up the Arctic exploration mania; the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of ...
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 ...
Virtual Roundtable on “Compression”
The mass of objects lead quiet lives awaiting activation. On shelves or in boxes, as papers or digital files, storage furnishes an ever-present ...
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 ...