Jennifer Howard

According to the New York times, it’s fashionable to hate the phone (“Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You,” by Pamela Paul, NYT, March 28, 2011). I appreciate some of the anti-phone arguments. If a telemarketer rings you up at the dinner hour , it tends not to improve the evening. If you work as a journalist, you will be the recipient of long, long voicemail messages from flaks who want to follow up the three emails they sent following up on the long, long voicemail message they left last week. That’s pesty, as Eric Carle might say. And I… Read more...

Not long ago, I had a chance to interview the cyberpunk Bruce Sterling, who’s in the process of giving his archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It was a neat, all-over-the-place conversation—one that’s given me some ideas for future stories—but one thread I can’t let go of is Sterling’s doubt about the wisdom of trusting electronic archives: He’s also fascinated by dead media—a subject he has written a lot about—and is robustly skeptical about the idea that digital media are durable. “It’s like thinking you’re going to run your Ford Edsel for the… Read more...