The Death of Reading

Grok Headline matches for The Death of Reading

Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary
Reading in America

Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary
Reading in America 07/09/2004 01:22 PM
download a .pdf of the actual study on reading .. report

nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf
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Not Life After Death -- Email After
Death

Not Life After Death -- Email After
Death 09/25/2004 09:08 PM

What I'm reading...

What I'm reading... 07/10/2004 05:41 PM

I linked to this the other day in the linklog, but it occurred to me that maybe I should do a kottke and pull out my contribution to Phil's What Webloggers are reading post and stick it up here just in case anyone's interested:

I’m currently reading Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity, which I was slightly dreading but now would highly recommend. After that I was hoping to muster the enthusiasm to have another stab at the last half of Larry Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. The arguments aren’t new to me, but I thought I should probably go back and read the man himself. I really need to start reading more fiction again. For a start, I need to catch up with my Neal Stephenson — I’ve not read The Confusion or Quic ksilver yet. But I’ll probably end up trawling through the various social software related bits of social science that I’ve been meaning to read for ages (Schelling< /a>, Goffman, Olson, Hall) and bunking off occasionally to grab a bit of Kim Philby’s My Silent War. I’ve become a bit obsessed with the whole Cambridge Spy thing since starting work at Broadcasting House.

Reading

Reading 12/11/2003 04:52 PM
My current reads, favourite reads of times past, and ever-expanding queue of reads to come. You'll see this post bounce to the top of the blog whenever I review or alter my list.

In Hand

• The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition by University of Chicago Press Sta ... an anal-retentive's Lord of the Rings in which an everyeditor goes on a voyage of pedantic discovery
• Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith ... third in the adventures of Botswana's favourite lady detective

For the full list, take a gander here.

On Queue

• Wireless Java: Developing with J2ME, Second Edition by Jonathan Knudsen
• The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail J. Sellen and Richard Harper
• The Kalahari Typing School for Men: More from the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer
• Artificial Life by Steven Levy
• A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
• The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker
• Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People by Steven Vogel
• The Social Life of Information by Seely Brown, Paul Duguid
• How Buildings Learn : What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand
• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

In Mind / On Shelf

• Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman ... good, clean, anal-retentive (in only the best way) site building
• Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone by Christian Lindholm, Turkka Keinonen, and Harri Kiljander ... droolworthy, to be sure; on the suggestion of Clay
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen ... waited long enough to dive into another of her lovely books
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis ... recommended by Tim
• Python in a Nutshell by Alex Martelli ... ;-)
• My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki
• Practical RDF by Shelley Powers
• Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith
• Pigs Have Wings: A Blandings Story by P. G. Wodehouse
• The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
• Washington Square by Henry James
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
• Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science by Collin Beavan
• Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis
• Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush by Frank Bruni
• The Empty Chair by Jeffery Deaver
• The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand
• The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin
• Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years by Bruce Sterling
• The Coffin Dancer by Jeffery Deaver
• Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea by Mark Ratner and Daniel Ratner
• Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks by Mark Buchanan
• Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
• Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
• "High Score! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", by Rusel DeMaria and Johnny Lee Wilson
• Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence by Paul Feig
• The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver
• Summerland by Michael Chabon
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold (re-read)
• How to Be Good by Nick Hornby
• Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
• The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
• Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger
• The Invisible Computer by Donald A. Norman
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (re-read)
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Curve Ball : Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett
• Love Is the Killer App : How to Win Business and Influence Friends by Tim Sanders
• Java Servlet Programming by Jason Hunter, William Crawford (Contributor)
• Something Fresh (A Blandings Story) by P. G. Wodehouse
• Interface Culture by Steven Johnson
• The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig
• Building Wireless Community Networks by Rob Flickenger
• Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Spider-Man: The Ultimate Guide by Tom Defalco, forward by Stan Lee
• The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
• Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud
• The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft by David Bank
• The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller That Changed The Way We Do Business by Clayton Christensen
• Joystick Nation : How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds by J. C. Herz
...

If you're reading this, according to NPR
you are "no one"

If you're reading this, according to NPR
you are "no one" 07/07/2004 09:30 PM

Scripting News

"No one was listening," said the NPR...

"No one was listening," said the NPR announcer, as she introduced the guy who post ed the note on Tuesday morning about the new Edwards decals on the Kerry campaign plane. No one was listening, except for the people who were .

Clearly no one reads blogs...

I'm going to be doing a Summer Reading Series interview for NPR this week. I should list all of the blogs people should read this summer. ;-)

Who's Reading What in RSS

Who's Reading What in RSS 01/16/2004 01:00 PM
Dave Winer has put together a cool way for people to see who's reading what in the blogworld, by asking people to share their OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files, which in this context is a list of Websites I subscribe to using my RSS reader. He calls it a commons for sharing outlines, feeds, taxonomy -- and I'm fascinated by its implications.

Reading everything

Reading everything 09/16/2004 09:19 AM
When I was a kid, we had the twenty-odd volumes of The World Book Encyclopedia sitting in its own rack in our upstairs hallway. It was a lively encyclopedia, with pages of colorful flags from around the world and a supplement that one year used acetate overlays with the enthusiasm of a Hollywood director who's discovered a left-over special effects budget. I was not the nerd who in 6th grade let it slip that he was reading the entire set, although I was envious of him. Fortunately, my attention was soon taken up by the serious pursuit of masturbation. Still,...

"Necessary" reading on Google

"Necessary" reading on Google 09/22/2004 02:38 PM
Mark Frauenfelder: Yoda sez: "I was just using Google to spell check the word necessary, you know to make sure I had it right, and the results were interesting! Nearly every result was a worthy read, with Hiroshima leading the pack." Link

Your Car Is Reading Your Email

Your Car Is Reading Your Email 09/09/2004 09:24 AM

Friday reading

Friday reading 01/09/2004 09:57 PM
PV Comics has hundreds of pages of free comics from a dozen talented artists. Friday reading fun!

Hi-tech reading aid comes to UK

Hi-tech reading aid comes to UK 07/15/2004 06:50 AM
A device that lets visually-impaired people read books more easily has been launched in the UK.

FC Now: From the Reading Pile

FC Now: From the Reading Pile 06/17/2005 03:40 PM
The most recent edition of Knowledge@Wharton includes a couple of interesting articles. Good Managers Focus on Employees' Strengths, Not Weaknesses focuses on the work of Marcus Buckingham, who suggests that good leaders play chess rather than checkers. And Florida Red...

Happy Reading.

Happy Reading. 12/28/2004 01:51 AM
eSchol arship Editions. Like ebooks? Want something free, nonfiction,"scholarly", publicly accessible, and more recent than Gutenberg ? (Lately I'm on an Ancient History kick.) My problem with this "eScholarship" site is they try to make it hard to download a whole ebook to read offline. For one of those, for people who are interested in 20th-century political history-cum-theory that's never had much to do with any U.S. election, today I'm recommending the Platform.

Currently Reading: Trading Up

Currently Reading: Trading Up 01/05/2004 03:00 PM
Trading Up: "Middle-market consumers, in the United States and around the world, are trading up to New Luxury products and services that deliver higher levels of quality, taste, and aspiration than conventional ones. Because New Luxury goods sell at premiums of 20-200% over standard midprice goods, they deliver higher profits. They also sell in much higher volumes than superpremium products."

It's a rather interesting look at what's driven the success of companies like Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, and others that make huge profits selling premium-priced products on a mainstream scale. This goes against the traditional assumption that goods sell at either a low volume or a low price. Turns out, people will "trade down" in some categories that don't matter to them in order to trade up in areas that do.

It pretty much only talks about real-world goods, not software or web-related stuff, nor even high-tech stuff, and I don't yet know how exactly the lessons apply to the areas I usually think about. But they probably do. (Is Apple a trading-up brand? Or is it not mainstream enough? Maybe") I'm only about a third of the way through it, but good stuff so far.

reading “Voynichese”

reading “Voynichese” 01/08/2004 08:17 PM

Here's something weird and interesting from this week's Economist: an article on the Voynich manuscript. Quote:

THE Voynich manuscript, once owned by Emperor Rudolph II in 16th-century Bohemia, is filled with drawings of fantastic plants, zodiacal symbols and naked ladies. Far more intriguing than its illustrations, however, is the accompanying text: 234 pages of beautifully formed, yet completely unintelligible script.

Modern scholars have pored over the book since 1912, when Wilfrid Voynich, an American antiquarian, bought the manuscript and started circulating copies in the hope of having it translated. Some 90 years later, the book still defies deciphering. It now resides at Yale University.

The manuscript is written in “Voynichese”, which consists of strange characters, some of which look like normal Latin letters and Roman numerals. Some analysts have suggested that Voynichese is a modified form of Chinese. Others think it may be Ukrainian with the vowels taken out. But Voynichese words do not resemble those of any known language. Nor is the text a simple transliteration into fanciful symbols: the internal structure of Voynichese words, and how they fit together in sentences, is unlike patterns seen in other languages.

The other alternatives are, as the article notes, that the manuscript is either in code, or simply a hoax. Nevertheless, my geek-sense flares up when reading about something like this. Oh boy! An entire manuscript to decrypt, and a few centuries old to boot! Does that sound like fun or what?

Interesting reading

Interesting reading 04/04/2005 06:48 PM

## Peter Drucker looks at the big picture of the world economy today -- really four economies, he says: information, money, multinationals and mercantile exchange.

For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world's foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation. Though the United States today still dominates the world economy of information, it is only one major player in the three other world economies of money, multinationals and trade. And it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could conceivably make America Number Two.

## Cy nthia Ozick reviews Joseph Lelyveld's memoir. I haven't read the book, but the former N.Y. Times editor apparently did a vast amount of legwork researching his own childhood. This is Ozick's discussion of the limitations of Lelyveld's approach:

...There is no all-pervading Proustian madeleine in Lelyveld's workaday prose. Yet salted through this short work is the smarting of an unpretentious lamentation: ''If this were a novel,'' ''If I were using these events in a novel,'' and so on. Flickeringly, the writer appears to see what is missing; and what is missing is the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective with its untethered vagaries: in brief, the not-nailed-down. Consequently Lelyveld's memory loop becomes a memory hole, through which everything that is not factually retrievable escapes. Memory, at bottom, is an act of imaginative re-creation, not of archival legwork. ''Yes, I was finding, it was possible to do a reporting job on your childhood,'' Lelyveld insists. Yes? Perhaps no. The memoirist has this in common with the novelist: he is like the watchful spider alert to every quiver on its lines. Sensation, not research.

Well put. I think one of the reasons I chose, as a young writer, a career as a critic rather than as a reporter was that I could not see devoting my life to writing that was all "nailed-down." Reporting is a necessary and valuable skill, and I have deep respect for those who do it well; it's hard, hard work, too. But it will typically miss that dimension of "the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective." In American journalism as it is conventionally defined by those who carve out the job descriptions, a critic's portfolio is broader, and it's possible, under the right alignment of stars, to feel as well as to record -- or rather, to record what one has felt along with what one has witnessed.

## Apparently there's a movement afoot in the world of writing about games to be less "nailed-down." It's called the "New Games Journalism" -- "a narrative, experiential approach that acknowledges the effect of the game on the player." I'll need to read up. This was sort of what I had in mind 15 years ago when I began to move my attention from the world of theater to the digital realm, and thought, hey, why not try writing more ambitious reviews of videogames? I'd just turned 30, though, and was already feeling that the gaming world was one I would be less and less able to keep up with as the decades advanced. (So right!) So I wrote one opus -- an "experiential" discourse on the world of Super Mario -- and moved on to broader terrain.

Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading 05/21/2004 08:24 AM
You can learn a heck of a lot by reading just a few enjoyable business books.

"Steve Reading"

"Steve Reading" 03/23/2005 04:58 PM

The Reading File

The Reading File 01/17/2004 10:58 PM
It's a good bet that Mars will continue to fascinate science fiction writers and interplanetary travel proponents.

after reading that thread

after reading that thread 01/17/2004 11:09 PM
R2D2 is his co-pilot .. forums.nasioc.com .. H-Wing del Sol .. an auto forum

forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=484634
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"after reading that thread"

"after reading that thread" 01/18/2004 09:15 AM

3D bl0g reading!

3D bl0g reading! 07/07/2004 12:43 PM
well, it's kind of like 2D reading on a skewed plane, but still! the future!

Blog reading up 58% in U.S

Blog reading up 58% in U.S 01/04/2005 11:15 AM
Slashdot Jan 4 2005 1:51PM GMT

Blog reading up 58% in U.S.

Blog reading up 58% in U.S. 01/04/2005 09:19 AM

More required reading

More required reading 11/10/2003 11:28 PM

Via Craig, Big John and Holly Bergevin present Float: The Theory and Flow ing and Positioning: Two Page Models. Both articles take a complex topic and present it in clear, straight forward terms with excellent illustrations and the kind of insight in to browser bugs (in particular the vagaries of IE) that you just won't find anywhere else.

A little light reading

A little light reading 04/11/2005 05:06 PM
Books that can help start a home business

Want A Job Reading Email?

Want A Job Reading Email? 07/20/2004 12:40 PM
A new study has found that companies are so worried about what's going out over email that 44% now employ people whose job it is to read outgoing email to make sure company secrets aren't getting out. Now, it may depend on the company (and secrets) in question, but doesn't it seem likely that paying someone to read through outgoing email may be a bit expensive than the likelihood of real risk from an outgoing email?

Reading with your ears

Reading with your ears 08/23/2004 06:49 AM
ZDNet Aug 23 2004 11:04AM GMT

Remedial XML: Further reading

Remedial XML: Further reading 06/06/2002 06:00 AM
CNET Jun 5 2002 10:13PM ET

"What bl0ggers are reading"

"What bl0ggers are reading" 07/10/2004 03:20 AM

I Need Reading Lessons

I Need Reading Lessons 05/13/2004 06:32 PM
I need reading lessons or something. I know that when people read on the web, they often skim. But I seem to forget that I'm one of those people too. Someone pointed me at this story a little while ago and I read skimmed it (twice) as "Yahoo Mail will be providing 100MB of 'virtually unlimited' storage" which is, obviously, a dumb thing to say. We all know that Gmail offers 10 times that, right? So I pointed this out...

Mind Reading

Mind Reading 03/13/2003 10:16 AM
An American researcher taps collective consciousness by scanning Web searches.

Magazine reading progress

Magazine reading progress 02/10/2004 01:17 PM
I know you're all on the edge of your chairs waiting for word about my 52 magazines in 52 weeks effort, and I shall not disappoint you on this fine, sunny day in NYC. So far, I have read copies of Wired, Print (2 issues), Prospect (a UK monthly), nest, Vogue (blech), and Juxtapoz (tied with Vogue for least appealing magazine so far). And I've just started Herbivore, a magazine...

Rebelscum Required Reading

Rebelscum Required Reading 04/12/2005 02:48 PM
On sale today, Rebelscum's own Jeremy Beckett has put together a must have book for anyone interested in researching the value of their Star Wars collection; the Official Price Guide to Star Wars Memorabilia. With contributions from many on the Rebelscum staff, we are honored to point to links at both Amazon.com and Amazon UK.

Reading the news reader

Reading the news reader 09/23/2004 03:00 AM
USA Today Sep 23 2004 6:09AM GMT

Three books worth reading

Three books worth reading 08/02/2004 09:58 AM
All are by friends, but I've turned my heart to stone and have taken a cold-blooded, objective eye to them, and recommend each: Dan Gillmor's We the Media has just hit the stores. Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Micah Sifry and Nancy Watzman's Is that a Politician in Your Pocket?...

Reading, Writing, and Landscaping

Reading, Writing, and Landscaping 06/03/2004 10:37 AM
I guess this article about teacher pay relative to other professions shouldn't be a surprise .. part-time jobs .. more» .. more

motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/05/teachers.html
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Score Reading Trainer 0.1.0

Score Reading Trainer 0.1.0 12/20/2003 08:43 AM
A trainer for reading musical scores.

Who Could Be Reading Your E-Mail? (PC
World)

Who Could Be Reading Your E-Mail? (PC
World) 07/02/2004 05:05 AM
PC World - Court says wiretapping laws don't prohibit ISPs from reading e-mail on their servers.
Grok Description matches for The Death of Reading
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The Death of Reading

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