Some bagatelles and bemusements from the week gone by:
* The Washington Post indulged in some familiar alarmism about what surfing the Internet is doing to our ability to read.
* But one of the experts the Post quoted, Andrew Dillon of the University of Texas, put up a blog post in which he made things out to be a little more complicated. “There is certainly a set of questions related to human reading that warrant our attention right now but the imminent collapse of culture as a result of digital scanning is not the one I would spend most of my time on.”
* It is still possible to use the word “magisterial” in a book review, especially when you’re writing about a book about the Great American Novel.
* Profs, you should know that your students “aren’t just rating you. They’re drawing you too.”
* I want to read danah boyd’s new book about teens and their online lives. I also admire how she and her publisher are making the book available as a free download as well as selling it through the usual channels.
* I love that there is a cookbook called, simply, “Egg.” (Okay, it does have a subtitle.)
* Hashtag of the week: #shakeass14 (tweets from the 2014 meeting of the Shakespeare Association in St. Louis).
So this is where T. S. Eliot is from. That explains so much. #shakeass14
— William Shakespeare (@Shakespeare) April 9, 2014
