Short Schrift

Chava Willig Levy, The Kindle and the Jewish Question : Like my father and the Jewish doctoral student, a Chasidic master living at the turn...

The Importance of Order: German Researchers Tackle Untidy Desks, from Der Spiegel Online : It's the same problem everywhere: Overloaded ...

[I especially like the shout-out to linotype.] June 23, 1868: Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap … Ding! | This Day In Tech | Wired.com : Christopher L...

George Packer on why Iran's nascent revolution may be different from Burma's stillborn 2007 protests : For a few days, Burmese citiz...

" Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest ," Douglas Quenqua, NYTimes: “Before you could be anonymous, and now you can’t,” said Nancy Sun...

Publius at Obsidian Wings : So there you have it – I’ve been officially outed by Ed Whelan. I would never have done that to my harshest cr...

Must listen: Ira Glass, Jad Abumrad, and Robert Krulwich on the differences between radio and television . Includes such gems as how radio a...

I am a sucker for long histories, especially when they're summarized with simple schema. Phillip Greenspun wrote this for a talk on how ...

We loooove Kevin Kelly around here at Snarkmarket. Robin tipped me off to his stuff and he's since joined Atul Gawande, Roger Ebert, Vir...

James Fallows, "On eloquence vs. prettiness" : [Obama's] eloquence is different from what I think of as rhetorical prettiness ...

Axiom : You can't teach anyone anything without intentionally or accidentally modeling humanity for them. It isn't enough to adequat...

The Chronicle of Higher Education on the Kindle DX and the market for electronic textbooks : Most college students—more than 80 percent, acc...

Gina Trapani hits on what might turn out to be Twitter's killer feature : When you post a question on Twitter and get a dozen replies wi...

Translator/critic Wyatt Mason sums up a year of terrific writerly blogging for Harpers : According to the webmaster, some hundreds of thousa...

A good anecdotal lead. Carolina Solis is a medical student who did research on parasitic infections caused by contaminated well water in rur...

Copyblogger lays out some guidelines for producing engaging podcasts or other audio recordings . Please note that if you maximize every sugg...

Something Walter Benjamin said has interested me for a while now: If centuries ago [writing] began gradually to lie down, passing from the u...

If you've got twenty-five minutes to listen to two smart + funny people talk about Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound, comparative literature, A...

Virginia Heffernan looks deep into the Twitterverse and doesn't like everything she finds : The "ambient awareness" that Twitt...

Two weeks ago I praised Harper's Scott Horton , who in addition to tiptop legal/political commentary regularly serves up poignant and re...