{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "technology on Stephen Schenkenberg", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2025/10/4351.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/", "feed_url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/11/25/dan-wang-sharply-introducing-the.html", "content_html": "\n

Dan Wang, sharply introducing the thesis to his new book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer a Perfect Future”:

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The best hedge, I know against tightening intentions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble. The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction. That’s the big idea behind this book. It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States' lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.

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Breakneck is the story of the Chinese state that yanked its people into modernity—an action rightfully envied by much of the world—using means that ran roughshod over many—an approach rightfully disdained by much of the world. It is also a reminder that the United States once knew the virtues of speed and ambitious construction. Traversing dazzling metropolises and gigantic factories, Breakneck will illuminate the astounding progress and the dark underbelly of the engineering state. The lawyerly society has virtues, too, to teach China. Each superpower offers a vision of how the other can be better, if only their leaders and peoples care to take more than a fleeting glance.

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Intrigued by Wang, I checked out and enjoyed this podcast interview as well his annual reflection letters.

\n", "date_published": "2025-11-25T18:48:13-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/11/25/dan-wang-sharply-introducing-the.html", "tags": ["affairs","technology","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/10/23/from-ai-models-get-brain.html", "content_html": "

From a new piece at Wired, “AI Models Get Brain Rot, Too“:

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A new study from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue University shows that large language models fed a diet of popular but low-quality social media content experience a kind of “brain rot” that may be familiar to anyone who has spent too long doomscrolling on X or TikTok.

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After describing the test:

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The models fed junk text experienced a kind of AI brain rot—with cognitive decline including reduced reasoning abilities and degraded memory. The models also became less ethically aligned and more psychopathic according to two measures.

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\n", "date_published": "2025-10-23T07:59:43-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/10/23/from-ai-models-get-brain.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/10/12/from-the-coming-wave-by.html", "content_html": "\n

From “The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman:

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Proliferation is catalyzed by two forces: demand and the resulting cost decreases, each of which drives technology to become even better and cheaper. The long and intricate dialogue of science and technology produces a chain of insights, breakthroughs, and tools that build and reinforce over time, productive recombinations that drive the fu-ture. As you get more and cheaper technology, it enables new and cheaper technologies downstream. Uber was impossible without the smartphone, which itself was enabled by GPS, which was enabled by satellites, which were enabled by rockets, which were enabled by combustion techniques, which were enabled by language and fire.

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\n", "date_published": "2025-10-12T18:04:34-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/10/12/from-the-coming-wave-by.html", "tags": ["technology","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/05/28/sharp-close-sam-altman-and.html", "content_html": "

Kyle Chayka’s smart close in a smart piece for The New Yorker, “Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life”:

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Altman and Ive are positioning their device as a solution to screen fatigue. They promise that their gadget will free us from technology, as evinced by their softly smiling faces in their joint portrait and the warmth and companionship of the café in which they conducted their video interview. But we will only get to this appealingly humane place, they imply, by adopting more technology—their technology. Speculative mockups online imagine an A.I. companion device that looks simple, like a rounded metal amulet—it would be Ive’s style to make the design approachable yet austere. Yet the sleek and frictionless object will rely on a vast infrastructure of factories and server farms; the labor of human maintenance workers and moderators; and, ultimately, the corpus of information that has been digested as training data, which is effectively the entire history of human thought. The little pendants around our necks will be a hundred million Trojan horses, smuggling A.I. into every aspect of our lives. The comforting tone of Altman and Ive’s pitch belies the enormous uncertainty of what their plan would unleash. A recent study in the United Kingdom found that forty-six per cent of youth ages sixteen to twenty-one would prefer to live in a world in which the internet doesn’t exist. Given all the regret and dread that digital culture has prompted, some two decades since the advent of social media, it seems worth thinking twice before allowing Altman and Ive’s incipient creation to occupy our time and our minds, too.

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\n", "date_published": "2025-05-28T21:57:02-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/05/28/sharp-close-sam-altman-and.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/04/06/sharp-dispiriting-nyt-piece-by.html", "content_html": "

Sharp, dispiriting NYT piece by Steven Kurutz: “The Gen X Career Meltdown,” subtitled, “Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.“ I remember being struck by Douglas Coupland’s novel, including the form, when my grad school class dug into it in the late 90s. In his intro, Kurutz reminds us that Coupland’s characters had reconciled themselves to “diminishing expectations of material wealth.”

\n", "date_published": "2025-04-06T18:39:57-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/04/06/sharp-dispiriting-nyt-piece-by.html", "tags": ["affairs","technology","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/04/06/case-study-how-to-name.html", "content_html": "

Case study: How to name and introduce a $3,600 keyboard in words, pictures, and video. (Via Andrew Wilkinson)

\n", "date_published": "2025-04-06T18:19:18-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/04/06/case-study-how-to-name.html", "tags": ["technology","branding"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/03/08/enjoyed-and-admired-john-warners.html", "content_html": "\n

Enjoyed John Warner’s new book, “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the AI.” A writer and teacher (and a former McSweeney’s editor), Warner has beliefs and ideals, but he’s not a scold, or an alarmist. With good humor and a clear-eyed sense of the positive uses of technology, he describes how ChatGPT — which he calls “automated text,” not “artificial intelligence” — encourages the circumvention of the nourishing, difficult work of both writing and reading. And what ChatGPT’s doing is not writing, he points out; it’s syntax. And he’s here in these pages to celebrate what’s lasting and human about real writing.

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“What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience. When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligences to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don’t seem too intelligent.

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ChatGPT is the opposite, a literal averaging of intelligences, a featureless landscape of pattern-derived text.

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Why have we declared this a marvel when there’s an infinite supply of greater marvels all around us?”

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\n", "date_published": "2025-03-08T19:37:23-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/03/08/enjoyed-and-admired-john-warners.html", "tags": ["technology","books","writing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/10/19/just-finished-a.html", "content_html": "\n

Just finished a quick read of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. A single sentence from the final third, describing yet another moment of chaos and spite, revealed something larger about the repugnant title character’s worldview: “And yet, Musk enjoyed the madness.”

\n", "date_published": "2024-10-19T14:49:03-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/10/19/just-finished-a.html", "tags": ["technology","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/09/16/muse-retrospective-though.html", "content_html": "

“Muse retrospective” — Though I wasn’t a committed user of the Muse app, I used to enjoy listening to the intelligent podcast put out by the team. Here, and I’m late to this, Muse’s Adam Wiggins offers a perceptive, considered look back at the ups and downs of building a new “tool for thought.”

\n", "date_published": "2024-09-16T20:47:59-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/09/16/muse-retrospective-though.html", "tags": ["technology","work"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/12/05/the-lost-voice.html", "content_html": "

“The Lost Voice,” a new two-minute short film from Apple, directed by Taika Waititi. A richly told story about a single, powerful accessibility feature.

\n", "date_published": "2023-12-05T22:31:05-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/12/05/the-lost-voice.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/06/10/a-g-sulzberger.html", "content_html": "

“A. G. Sulzberger on the Battles Within and Against the New York Times”: I was very impressed with Sulzberger during this extended conversation with David Remnick. Brought to mind the scenes in the Ben Smith book noted below, in which the NYT transforms from an org that appears to seek advice from the likes of BuzzFeed to one that builds on its ‘legacy’ status, rising confidently and profitably as that site falters.

\n", "date_published": "2023-06-10T22:21:41-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/06/10/a-g-sulzberger.html", "tags": ["media","technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/06/04/i-found-a.html", "content_html": "\n

I found a good amount of Ben Smith’s briskly paced new book “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral” disheartening, in considering the vast amount of energy often bright (not always cynical) people were putting into voraciously attracting and retaining eyeballs with puffs of briefly entertaining trifles (some of which I also hungrily clicked on, and will do so again). Smith shares a number of interesting stories, both from his time observing and then working from within this particular type of machine. This was my favorite small detail, in which Smith recalls what happened after he joined the rising BuzzFeed media empire (after first turning the offer down) and pressed publish on his debut piece, “Welcome to BuzzFeed Politics,” setting the tone for a significant new social news organiziation:

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Then I went to check the page: it was nearly illegible, the lines almost on top of each other. BuzzFeed had never before published a full paragraph.

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\n", "date_published": "2023-06-04T11:32:02-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/06/04/i-found-a.html", "tags": ["technology","books","publishing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/06/01/i-feel-completely.html", "content_html": "\"\"\n

I feel behind not having heard of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which charts the rise, fall, and settling-in adoption of emerging technologies. One of the hosts of the “People vs. Algorithms” podcast referred to it in a recent conversation about ChatGPT. Seems apt. We might be getting closer to the trough of disillusionment.

\n", "date_published": "2023-06-01T20:01:10-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/06/01/i-feel-completely.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/05/07/a-meaty-thoughtprovoking.html", "content_html": "

Thought-provoking piece by Ted Chiang: “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?”

\n", "date_published": "2023-05-07T19:51:35-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/05/07/a-meaty-thoughtprovoking.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/01/02/a-tweet-before.html", "content_html": "

“A Tweet Before Dying”: Paul Ford, perceptive and funny and deep yet again, writing in Wired. Here he is on stepping away from his social stream to dive into curious PDFs unearthed from decades past:

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But the seeking is important, too; people should explore, not simply feed.

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\n", "date_published": "2023-01-02T22:18:13-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/01/02/a-tweet-before.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/01/02/in-the-nyt.html", "content_html": "

In the NYT, "‘Snow Fall’ at 10." I can clearly remember when this immersive multimedia piece came out — discussing it with my agency colleagues, trying to figure out how we could get clients on board.

\n", "date_published": "2023-01-02T22:14:42-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/01/02/in-the-nyt.html", "tags": ["technology","content strategy"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/12/02/the-email-newsletter.html", "content_html": "

“The E-Mail Newsletter for the Mogul Set”: Fascinating NewYorker.com piece on Puck, the new digital media brand that impressed me enough — strong brand out of the gate, intriguing framework — to count me among its paying subscribers.

\n", "date_published": "2022-12-02T23:17:10-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/12/02/the-email-newsletter.html", "tags": ["media","technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/11/27/learned-today-in.html", "content_html": "

Learned today in the NYT that there is an active “unofficial Tumblr historian” who is no longer on Tumblr, and who is also 22.

\n", "date_published": "2022-11-27T11:20:03-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/11/27/learned-today-in.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/11/26/it-took-several.html", "content_html": "

It took several days — and a few sections floated past me without comprehension — but what a treat it was to take in Matt Levine’s 40,000-word feature “The Crypto Story”, which took up an entire recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. Liked this bit:

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Crypto, in its origins, was about abandoning the system of social trust that’s been built up over centuries and replacing it with cryptographic proof. And then it got going and rebuilt systems of trust all over again. What a nice vote of confidence in the idea of trust.

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Levine’s “Money Stuff” newsletter is one of my favorite finds of 2022. Consistently entertaining, informed, and in-depth. Not sure how he does it, and so frequently.

\n", "date_published": "2022-11-26T10:41:03-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/11/26/it-took-several.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/09/18/this-passage-from.html", "content_html": "

This passage from a NYT article about LinkedIn and oversharing reads like it could have come from a novel:

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“I had a post that went absolutely viral on LinkedIn,” said the influencer, who uses the name Natalie Rose in her work. The post, a crying selfie with a caption about anxiety and the reality of being an influencer, got over 2.7 million impressions. “That led to me having some business opportunities with anxiety apps, things like that,” she said. “I got a lot of connections and followers from it, all because I chose to be vulnerable in a post.''

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\n", "date_published": "2022-09-18T09:43:32-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/09/18/this-passage-from.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/08/21/in-his-concise.html", "content_html": "\n

In his concise and incisive book What Tech Calls Thinking, Adrian Daub examines and punctures a range of tech proclamations and tropes that many of us have just gotten used to hearing in recent decades.

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That may sound sober, but it was an engaging read. Here’s Daub — a Stanford professor who’s primarily focused on the humanities — on Ayn Rand (whom he writes about in the context of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Pixar):

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In other words, there is a weird (and acknowledged) tendency here to treat an effort like architecture, which by definition requires a group and—dare I say it—collectives, as though it were the art that an individual makes in the solitude of a studio or a favorite writing nook. This is what historians of ideas call a ‘genius aesthetic’: it describes our tendency to think that the meaning of a work of art comes out of the specific mind of its creator, not out of the preexisting rules that creator worked within nor the broader spirit of the society and time. When you’re talking about a novel, that makes a certain amount of sense. But Rand extended this sense of individual brilliance to some of humanity’s most communal undertakings. Have you ever looked at a rail line and thought, I wonder what the one genius who decided to build a bridge over this valley was thinking? Rand has. And notice that, thanks to Elon Musk, we actually finally do have a billionaire whose weird tunnel-boring projects are basically a form of performance art—a pure emanation of individual genius, and sort of useless to anyone else.

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\n", "date_published": "2022-08-21T21:22:15-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2022/08/21/in-his-concise.html", "tags": ["technology","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2021/11/29/smart-thoughts-here.html", "content_html": "

Smart thoughts here from Benedict Evans: “Notes on newsletters.”

\n", "date_published": "2021-11-29T12:34:24-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2021/11/29/smart-thoughts-here.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2019/05/30/paul-fords-latest.html", "title": "Paul Ford's Latest", "content_html": "

Any new Paul Ford piece is a must-read for me. No one else I know of writes about technology with such a combination of literary style and wit and hands-on knowledge. (Once the Web Editor of Harper’s, he’s now the CEO of the digital product studio Postlight.)

Here’s the opening to Ford’s latest Wired cover story, “Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry”:

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Nerds, we did it. We have graduated, along with oil, real estate, insurance, and finance, to the big T. Trillions of dollars. Trillions! Get to that number any way you like: Sum up the market cap of the major tech companies, or just take Apple’s valuation on a good day. Measure the number of dollars pumped into the economy by digital productivity, whatever that is. Imagine the possible future earnings of Amazon.

The things we loved—the Commodore Amigas and AOL chat rooms, the Pac-Man machines and Tamagotchis, the Lisp machines and RFCs, the Ace paperback copies of Neuromancer in the pockets of our dusty jeans—these very specific things have come together into a postindustrial Voltron that keeps eating the world. We accelerated progress itself, at least the capitalist and dystopian parts. Sometimes I’m proud, although just as often I’m ashamed. I am proudshamed.

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\n", "date_published": "2019-05-30T20:43:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2019/05/30/paul-fords-latest.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2019/01/16/basecamps-public-postmortem.html", "title": "Basecamp's Public Post-Mortem", "content_html": "

In an episode of the company’s “Rework” podcast, Basecamp staff look back on their five-hour outrage in November. Savvy framing of one of the company’s worst days.

\n", "date_published": "2019-01-16T09:40:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2019/01/16/basecamps-public-postmortem.html", "tags": ["technology","work"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/12/22/craig-mod-on.html", "title": "Craig Mod on the Future of Books", "content_html": "

Thoughtful piece at Wired from someone who’s been thinking and writing about this subject for quite some time: “We have arrived to the once imagined Future Book in piecemeal truths.”

\n", "date_published": "2018-12-22T08:23:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/12/22/craig-mod-on.html", "tags": ["technology","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/06/18/paul-ford-on.html", "title": "Paul Ford on Microsoft Buying GitHub", "content_html": "

From the piece:

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That’s how code happens in 2018. The process used to be the sort of thing people did in slow and ad hoc ways, a few times a year, and only after a lot of infighting over email. Now the same process might happen 10 times a day, and the infighting is right there in the pull requests. Hundreds of people might be working on one code thing or 10 people on 100 code things. GitHub makes that doable. I can’t imagine life without it. I’d much rather tell a newbie to get a GitHub account than suggest she read the git manual. If all companies are becoming software companies, GitHub is a primary enabler.

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A truly fun aspect of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub is that it was announced before Apple Inc.’s Worldwide Developers Conference. This is like when Passover overlaps with Easter in New York City. The WWDC, sacred nerd summit of Appledom, is where they announce things like a new “night mode” for the operating system and try to convince programmers that Apple Watch matters. But GitHub is nerd infrastructure. Huge portions of modern culture—Google’s TensorFlow machine-learning software, for instance, and even other programming languages, such as Mozilla’s Rust—run on code managed there. For Microsoft to trot this out during WWDC is a real thunder-stealer. It’s nice to see global-platform capitalism played with a little verve.

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Ford is one of the most consistently entertaining and informed writers on technology — from the inside out. A former Harper’s staffer, he’s also one of the few writers who can casually and believably drop a Borges reference in a deep-tech piece. (Note: I also dig his podcast.)

\n", "date_published": "2018-06-18T22:01:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/06/18/paul-ford-on.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/06/08/more-great-listening.html", "title": "More Great Listening: Batuman \u0026 Sow", "content_html": "

The Longform Podcast's new episode with Elif Batuman is fantastic. I've enjoyed her writing for a few years, and in this interview you can just feel her thinking deeply about literature and writing and gender and observing in cities around the world and much more. As interviewer Max Linsky tweeted when sharing the link: \"Genuinely, this is the most fun I have had in a long time. It was so fun, in fact, that at one point I stopped and said 'Wow I’m just very happy to be sitting here with you! This is so fun!' And then Elif was very gracious with me and then she said a bunch more brilliant things.\" It's true. 

I also loved Design Observer's new episode with Aminatou Sow. She was new to me, and I'm clearly late to the game. On being late, though: Really enjoyed Sow's skepticism of the tech press's focus on the young (who wants to peak at 28?), vs. her interest in longevity; she's long thought the ideal age is 63 .

\n", "date_published": "2018-06-08T22:11:55-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/06/08/more-great-listening.html", "tags": ["technology","work","books","literature"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2017/12/31/year-in-review.html", "title": "Year in Review: 2017", "content_html": "\"\"\nContinuing a 17-year tradition, I'm happy to share my Annual Favorites list for the year 2017: 

Family
Let's start with the best thing that happened to my family this year, which is the arrival of Sylvia Huremović Schenkenberg in late April. We're still smiling at her the way Leo was above, just a few days in. 

Books

  1. My Struggle: Book 5, Karl Ove Knausgård

  2. Blind Spot, Teju Cole

  3. Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine

  4. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

  5. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen

  6. Swing Time, Zadie Smith

  7. Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, John Hodgman

  8. Now You See It and Other Essays on Design, Michael Bierut

  9. Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, Karl Ove Knausgård and Fredrik Ekelund

  10. Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah

  11. Obama: The Call of History, Peter Baker

  12. Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure, Bianca Bosker

  13. A Separation, Katie Kitamura

  14. Paul Rand: A Designer's Art

  15. More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers, Jonathan Lethem

  16. Powers of Ten, Philip Morrison

  17. Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind, Peter D. Kramer

Movies

  1. Moonlight

  2. Lady Bird

  3. Under the Skin

  4. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

  5. Clouds of Sils Maria

  6. Life Itself

  7. Arrival

TV/Streaming

  1. Better Call Saul, Season 3

  2. The Americans, Seasons 4-5

  3. OJ: Made in America

  4. Master of None, Season 2

Audio
I'm going to skip making a long list of favorite albums and podcasts, and instead note a discovery in each, respectively: Phoebe Bridgers (watch her Tiny Desk Concert here), and S-Town. They each feel a bit haunted, and they share, in parts, a gothic sensibility. (Also: I can't not mention Black Thought's instantly classic 11-minute freestyle video, which c'mon.) 

Technology 
Our SONOS Play: 1 is used every evening for listening to music as we get ready for dinner or just goof around with the kids. Things 3 finally launched, and it's attractive and enjoyable to use. It's only been a month or so, but I've been enjoying trying out Ulysses as a writing environment (despite having no interest in using Markdown.) I've been impressed with Airtable as a flexible, humane alternative to Excel, when you need a database of some kind but have zero needs for financial calculations. (I'd seen the fancy Sandwich video when it launched, but didn't realize it could fit my needs until the co-founder's segment on Track Changes.)

Personal
As noted on this website earlier this month, I was sad to see an end to the remarkable life of William H. Gass, who I was lucky enough to get to know over the past decade-plus. Bill lived a long and productive life, dying at 93, and working through his final year. I was honored to write briefly about him for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and speak about his life and work on St. Louis Public Radio. I continue posting notes from readers and admirers at ReadingGass.org.

Work
Highlights from a very fun year at Forest Park Forever include engaging the public in the final year of Forever: The Campaign for Forest Park's Future, speaking at the international City Parks Alliance conference in the Twin Cities, launching a 2.0 version of ForestParkMap.org, and publishing Forest Park: Snapshots of a St. Louis Gem.\n", "date_published": "2017-12-31T23:51:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2017/12/31/year-in-review.html", "tags": ["technology","work","books","film","family","year in review"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2017/01/20/anil-dash-w.html", "title": "Anil Dash w/ Krista Tippett", "content_html": "

Intelligent, upbeat conversation about how Dash is working toward a more humane engagement with technology.

\n", "date_published": "2017-01-20T09:57:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2017/01/20/anil-dash-w.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2017/01/15/jason-fried-restoring.html", "title": "Jason Fried: \"Restoring Sanity to the Office\"", "content_html": "

I'm such a believer in how Fried and his Basecamp colleagues position themselves for productive work. (Also great: this blog post about how the team made decisions about what Basecamp can solve and chooses not to solve.)

\n", "date_published": "2017-01-15T23:34:36-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2017/01/15/jason-fried-restoring.html", "tags": ["technology","work"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/08/13/listenforestparkorg.html", "title": "Listenforestpark.org", "content_html": "
\n

\n

Fun audio project our Forest Park Forever team launched this summer.

\n", "date_published": "2016-08-13T21:08:52-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/08/13/listenforestparkorg.html", "tags": ["technology","STL"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/01/01/year-in-review.html", "title": "Year in Review: 2015", "content_html": "

Continuing a 15-year tradition (though one that’s gotten briefer with age and fatherhood), here’s a roundup of some of my favorite things experienced during the past 12 months: 

Books

  1. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

  2. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante

  3. The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante

  4. The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante

  5. Lila, Marilyn Robinson

  6. My Struggle: Book 2, Karl Ove Knausgård

  7. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

  8. H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

  9. The Balloonists, Eula Biss

  10. Being Mortal, Atul Gawande

  11. Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender

  12. Stress Tests, Timothy F. Geithner

  13. Van Gogh: A Power Seething, Julian Bell

  14. Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo, Nicholas Carlson

  15. Bark, Lorrie Moore

  16. Girl In a Band, Kim Gordon

So-so:  Grace: A Memoir; I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel

Movies

  1. Ida

  2. Ex Machina

  3. While We’re Young

  4. Birdman

  5. Boyhood

  6. Mr. Turner

  7. Carol

  8. Interstellar

  9. Magic in the Moonlight

So-so: Spectre; Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

TV

  1. Borgen: Season 3

  2. Mad Men: Final Season

  3. An Honorable Woman

  4. Black Mirror: Season 1

  5. Master of None: Season 1

  6. Veep: All Seasons

  7. The Good Wife: Seasons 1-6

  8. Sherlock

Podcasts

  1. Design Matters with Debbie Millman

  2. Slate Culture Gabfest

  3. The Longform Podcast

  4. The Monocle Weekly

  5. Serial

  6. The Entrepreneurs (Monocle)

  7. The Political Scene

  8. Section D (Monocle)

  9. The Foreign Desk (Monocle)

  10. Mom and Dad Are Fighting

  11. The Talk Show

  12. Connected

  13. ATP

  14. The New Yorker Radio Hour

Music
I used to make long lists of specific albums purchased and enjoyed, but since I’ve gone to paid streaming (and, maybe, since I’ve become a committed podcast listener), it’s harder for me to point to specific recordings at a year’s end. This is especially the case since Rdio shut down, and I’m now starting fresh with Spotify — my digital records are kind of a mess. While I listen to hours of classical and ambient/lush music through the headphones during work, a few specific artists I spent more time with in 2015 include Angel Olsen, Youth Lagoon, Sun Kil Moon, Sharon Van Etten, My Bubba, Jennifer O’Connor, Girlpool, Atlas Sound, Earl Sweatshirt, J Cole, Common, Pusha T, A$AP Rocky, Villagers, Natalie Prass, and Perfume Genius.

NYC + D.C.
I had the good fortune of accompanying my wife on a work trip she had to NYC, and it was incredibly culture-rich. Highlights included the new Whitney, MoMA (Yoko Ono and Bjork special exhibitions), The Drawing Center, David Zwirner Gallery (Serra show), Neue Galerie (sensational collection), the Cooper Hewitt, and “Drifting in Daylight” in Central Park (where I shot this short phone video). We also enjoyed a long weekend in D.C. with family, with pleasant dips into the National Gallery (terrific Caillebotte show) and The Phillips Collection (first time, great time).

Work
I’m fortunate to have a great job at Forest Park Forever, and 2015 saw a few especially fun projects ship. This includes the introduction of our new brand platform, our launch of Forestparkmap.org and the formal introduction of Forever: The Campaign for Forest Park’s Future, with a new website that features a beautiful campaign video we made with the team at Once Films.

Family
As referenced appropriately at top, so much of this year — and so much of every day — has been about Tamara and I raising our son. I’d been told that right around 2 is a fun age, and it’s true. This year had a ton of special moments, including — just to pick one, which we happened to catch on film — Leo’s changing expression during his first ride on a carousel at the Saint Louis Zoo. 

\n", "date_published": "2016-01-01T20:55:20-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/01/01/year-in-review.html", "tags": ["music","technology","books","film","year in review"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/08/25/the-unauthorized-marissa.html", "title": "The Unauthorized Marissa Mayer Biography", "content_html": "

22,000 words. A very interesting read.

\n", "date_published": "2013-08-25T22:17:09-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/08/25/the-unauthorized-marissa.html", "tags": ["technology","work"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/04/11/robert-silvers-toward.html", "title": "Robert Silvers: Toward a \"New Form of Criticism\"", "content_html": "

At New York Magazine, the great journalist Mark Danner talks at length with The New York Review of Books' Robert Silvers. Here’s one bit about online publishing and social media, which strikes me not as fuddy-duddy, but very considered:

\n
\n

To tweet or not to tweet. And not to tweet is to be left behind. And that raises a question: What is this? What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs, and that they are not getting and will not get the critical attention that prose anywhere should have unless we find a new form of criticism.

\n
\n
\n

If a novel is published, we have a novel review. If poetry is produced, if a play or a movie or a TV show is produced, there are the forms of criticism we know. With the new social media, with much of the content of the Internet, there are very few if any critical forms that are appropriate. They are thought to be somewhere partially in a private world. Facebook is a medium in which privacy is, or at least is thought to be, in some way crucial. The premise, at least, is that of belonging to a family, a circle of friends. And there’s another premise, that any voice should have its moment. And so there seems a resistance to intrusive criticism.

\n
\n
\n

But this means that billions of words go without the faintest sign of assessment. And yet, if one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language, such as affection, privacy, honesty, cogency, clarity—then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.

\n
\n", "date_published": "2013-04-11T17:18:27-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/04/11/robert-silvers-toward.html", "tags": ["media","technology","publishing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/04/11/codesign-on-editorially.html", "title": "CoDesign on Editorially", "content_html": "

Excited to try this new online writing and editing environment, built by a few all-stars. 

\n", "date_published": "2013-04-11T09:04:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/04/11/codesign-on-editorially.html", "tags": ["technology","work"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/03/06/the-ecosystem-known.html", "title": "The Ecosystem Known As Reading", "content_html": "

Andrew Piper, writing in Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times:

Books will always be there. That is what they are by definition: there. Whether in the classroom, the library, the archive, the bookstore, the warehouse, or online, it is our choice, however, where books will be. It is time to stop worrying and start thinking. It is time to put an end to the digital utopias and print eulogies, bookish venerations and network gothic, and tired binaries like deep versus shallow, distributed versus linear, or slow versus fast. Now is the time to understand the rich history of what we have thought books have done for us and what we think digital texts might do differently. We need to remember the diversity that surrounds reading and the manifold, and sometimes strange, tools upon which it has historically been based. The question is not one of “versus,” of two antagonists squaring off in a ring; rather, the question is far more ecological in nature. How will these two very different species and their many varieties coexist within the greater ecosystem known as reading?

\n", "date_published": "2013-03-06T22:15:40-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/03/06/the-ecosystem-known.html", "tags": ["technology","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/01/01/year-in-review.html", "title": "Year in Review: 2012", "content_html": "

This post is part of my Annual Favorites list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus.

Favorite Books (Goodreads profile)

  1. The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages)

  2. Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 (choicepassages)

  3. Life Sentences, by William H. Gass

  4. Nox, by Anne Carson

  5. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers

  6. Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

  7. Donald Judd

  8. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.T. Max

  9. The Long Goodbye, by Megan O’Rourke

  10. Gerhard Richter: Panorama

  11. Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson

  12. The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal

  13. Chip Kidd: Book One: Work, 1986-2006

  14. The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin

  15. The Obamas, Jodi Kantor

  16. Some of My Lives, by Rosamond Bernier

  17. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

  18. Berlin Stories, by Robert Walser

  19. The Address Book, by Sophie Calle

  20. The Englishman who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects, by John Tingey

  21. Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil

  22. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

  23. The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andrić

  24. Shards, by Ismet Prcić

  25. The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter

  26. Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee

  27. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne, by Sarah Bakewell

  28. Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda

  29. The Art of Intelligence, by Henry A. Crumpton

  30. Zoe Strauss: 10 Years

  31. Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens

  32. Karaoke Culture, by Dubravka Ugrešić

  33. The Fate of Greenland, by Philip W. Conkling

  34. Redheaded Peckerwood, by Christian Patterson

Happy to have read Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile, Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, and Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job, but would keep them off the ranked list. Same with “Mark Owen”‘s No Easy Day.

Favorite Movies: 2012 (Letterboxd profile) 

  1. Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present

  2. Gerhard Richter Painting

  3. Moonrise Kingdom

  4. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

  5. Lincoln

  6. The Master

  7. The Queen of Versailles

  8. Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap

  9. Arbitrage

  10. Skyfall

  11. The Dark Knight Rises

Didn’t connect with: Headhunters, We Have a Pope, The Bourne Legacy.

Favorite Movies: Pre-2012

  1. A Separation

  2. Bill Cunningham New York

  3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

  4. Certified Copy

  5. Margin Call

  6. Notorious

  7. A Dangerous Method

  8. Bridesmaids

  9. Young Adult

  10. Moneyball

  11. Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop

  12. J. Edgar

  13. Too Big to Fail

  14. Hopscotch

  15. Haywire

Music

I continue to be a huge fan of Rdio, which I pay $10 a month to be able to stream music on a desktop, iPad, or iPhone. (This includes, say, streaming the new Nas via my home’s wi-fi as I mow my suburban lawn.) There will always be rituals and a closeness to the music I miss from my CD days, but the advantages of Rdio — especially the ability to discover and immediately listen to new music, particularly hip-hop and classical — are significant. I don’t have a ranked list here, but my listening history is an open book.

Favorite Articles, Essays & Blog Posts (categorized, not ranked)

Affairs

Culture

Tech & Media

Essays

Misc. Reporting, Articles & Posts

Most-Used iPhone & iPad Apps

I start every morning with the NYTimes’ iPad app. I listen to podcasts, NPR, and music via Instacast, Public Radio Player, and Rdio. I journal using Day One, which is synched using Dropbox on all devices. The new 1Password 4 is a slick companion to the essential desktop app. I organize a lot of my work and personal life using Evernote, and keep up with tasks using Things. Other apps I use often: Reeder (every night, to catch up with the day’s articles), Goodreads, Fantastical, Tweetbot (iphone) and Twitter (iPad), Instagram, Facebook, Checkmark, Instapaper, Pinboard, Netflix, PBS for iPad, Simple, and iBooks (largely for work PDFs).

Final Notes

One unusual memory I have from 2012 is spending several weekday evenings in March walking through my neighborhood for an hour or so, listening to the day’s oral arguments for and against the healthcare act. (My greatest moment of exasperation was hearing Justice Scalia mock-ask whether he was seriously supposed to get through so many pages of material.) In April, I published Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time, an iPad-only e-book pairing an essay by William H. Gass with photographs by Michael Eastman; New York Times coverage was a cherry on top. May’s Confab conference was one of the best I’ve attended. In August, Tamara and I enjoyed a few highly cultural days in Miami. Surpassing all that, though — we’re expecting a baby in late May of 2013. I expect this should be my best year yet.

\n", "date_published": "2013-01-01T14:45:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/01/01/year-in-review.html", "tags": ["music","affairs","technology","books","literature","year in review"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/12/09/craig-mod-subcompact.html", "title": "Craig Mod: \"Subcompact Publishing\"", "content_html": "

An important and insightful essay. I hope Mod writes a part two that looks a bit more at how exactly (to continue his metaphor) the small vehicles would get made. 

\n

Related: Mod’s round-up of coverage of his essay. This Jim Ray piece from the Mule blog isn’t on there, but I think it’s worth reading.

\n", "date_published": "2012-12-09T11:29:50-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/12/09/craig-mod-subcompact.html", "tags": ["media","technology","publishing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/08/17/popping-up-in.html", "title": "Popping Up in the New York Times", "content_html": "

Hey, there’s The New York Times covering Abstractions Arrive! The piece, written by David Streitfeld, includes a new interview with Gass about books and technology. Thanks for the nod, Paper of Record!

\n", "date_published": "2012-08-17T08:54:55-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/08/17/popping-up-in.html", "tags": ["technology","william h gass","publishing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/05/29/craig-mod-hack.html", "title": "Craig Mod: \"Hack the Cover\"", "content_html": "

As ever, Mod offers smart, forward-looking thoughts on books and publishing. His central question:

\n
\n

[I]f so much of what book cover design has evolved into is largely a brick-and-mortar marketing tool, then what place does a ‘cover’ hold in digital books? Especially after you purchase it? But, more tellingly, even before you purchase it? If you’re interested in the questions, you’ll be interested in the entire essay. Recommended.

\n
\n", "date_published": "2012-05-29T20:21:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/05/29/craig-mod-hack.html", "tags": ["technology","books","publishing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/04/10/paul-ford-on.html", "title": "Paul Ford on Facebook and Instagram", "content_html": "

At NYMag.com:

First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. 

\n", "date_published": "2012-04-10T12:35:18-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/04/10/paul-ford-on.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/03/29/craig-mod-on.html", "title": "Craig Mod on Building an App (and a Book)", "content_html": "

As thoughtful and personal as his previous pieces. 

\n", "date_published": "2012-03-29T12:04:08-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/03/29/craig-mod-on.html", "tags": ["technology","work","books","publishing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/03/18/dwight-garner-the.html", "title": "Dwight Garner: \"The Way We Read Now\"", "content_html": "

Great piece in The New York Times, with clear-eyed (and entertaining) commentary from a writer and book critic about how technology has improved his reading life. This bit comes from his section on the smartphone:

\n
\n

Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened to Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” this way. The shirt pocket method is better than using ear buds, which block out the natural world. My wife tucks her phone into her bra, on long walks, and listens to Dickens novels. I find this unbearably sexy.

\n
\n", "date_published": "2012-03-18T09:28:40-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/03/18/dwight-garner-the.html", "tags": ["technology","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/03/08/instapaper-placebo.html", "title": "\"Instapaper Placebo\"", "content_html": "

Brilliant.

\n", "date_published": "2012-03-08T15:45:45-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/03/08/instapaper-placebo.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/27/mandy-brown-deploy.html", "title": "Mandy Brown: ", "content_html": "

Really like this post:

\n
\n

Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.

\n

Writing has (so far) not generally benefited from this kind of process; but now that the text has been fully liberated from the tyranny of the printing press, we are presented with an opportunity: to deploy texts, instead of merely publishing them.

\n
\n", "date_published": "2012-02-27T11:49:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/27/mandy-brown-deploy.html", "tags": ["technology","content strategy"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/20/tim-parks-defends.html", "title": "Tim Parks Defends E-Books", "content_html": "

At the New York Review of Books blog, a refreshingly contrarian post:

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

\n", "date_published": "2012-02-20T10:54:40-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/20/tim-parks-defends.html", "tags": ["technology","books","publishing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/16/john-gruber-on.html", "title": "John Gruber on Mountain Lion", "content_html": "

Apple’s next OS — highly informed by iOS — introduced to Gruber in a private briefing by Phil Schiller himself.

\n", "date_published": "2012-02-16T09:41:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/16/john-gruber-on.html", "tags": ["technology"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/05/evgeny-morozov-the.html", "title": "Evgeny Morozov: \"The Death of the Cyberflâneur\"", "content_html": "

An interesting piece published in today’s NYT:

As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. 

Reminded me a bit of the “serendipity” exchanges from 2006. 

\n", "date_published": "2012-02-05T12:47:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/05/evgeny-morozov-the.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/01/31/nicholas-carr-why.html", "title": "Nicholas Carr: \"Why publishers should give away ebooks\"", "content_html": "

Kind of. 

Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.

I’ve daydreamed about this before. Would enjoy seeing it happen. (I had no clue, by the way, that vinyl-record buyers like Carr are indeed scoring free digital copies of the music.)  

\n", "date_published": "2012-01-31T18:44:04-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/01/31/nicholas-carr-why.html", "tags": ["technology","books","publishing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/01/30/franzen-on-books.html", "title": "Franzen on Books, E-Books, and Permanence", "content_html": "

Jonathan Franzen, regretting the rise (and, it seems, existence) of e-books:  

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.

For serious readers, Franzen said, “a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”. “Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change,” he continued. “Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

Luckily for Franzen, not all printed books are as permanent as all that. From the October 2011 article “Jonathan Franzen’s book Freedom suffers UK recall”:

In a highly embarrassing move, publishers HarperCollins were today forced to offer to exchange thousands of copies after Franzen revealed that the UK edition of a novel dubbed “the book of the century” is based on an early draft manuscript, and contains hundreds of mistakes in spelling, grammar and characterisation.

More than 8,000 copies of the faulty first edition have been sold since it was published last week, with 80,000 hardbacks of the book in print. The mistakes were discovered yesterday.

Franzen told the Guardian that the book, the follow-up to 2001’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Corrections, contained “a couple of hundred differences at the level of word and sentence and fact” as well as “small but significant changes to the characterisations of Jessica and Lalitha” – the daughter and the assistant of one of the novel’s central characters.

HarperCollins, who say the errors are mainly typographical, have launched a hurried operation to let purchasers exchange their faulty copy via bookshops or pre-paid post. The new version is being rushed through the printers over the weekend and will be available early next week.

\n", "date_published": "2012-01-30T15:22:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/01/30/franzen-on-books.html", "tags": ["technology","books","publishing"] } ] }