technology

Aug. 22, 2010

Why the novel will survive the disappearance of the book

Media evolution, of course, does claim casualties. But most often, these are means of distribution or storage, especially physical ones that can be transformed into digital bits. Photographic film is supplanted, but people take more pictures than ever. CD’s no longer dominate, as music is more and more distributed online. “Books, magazines and newspapers are [...]

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Aug. 16, 2010

Hanging Up

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It [...]

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May. 21, 2010

Writing Like It’s 1999

Why I use a ten-year-old, slow, WiFi-free ThinkPad: it’s the perfect writer’s computer

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Dec. 1, 2009

Lukewarm Kindling

Anthony Grafton on the Kindle, which he loves but describes as “reading free of visual delight”: Open an old-fashioned book — a book published by Zone this year, or, even better, by Alfred A. Knopf thirty or forty years ago, or, better still, one printed by Aldo Manuzio a few hundred years before that — and you [...]

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