David Pennington

. As author Leah Price put it in her book How to Do Things with Nooks in Victorian Britain: “Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value.”

It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.

But this raises an obvious question—if we lose libraries as the last public space for quiet reading and reflection, what can replace it?

Here on my screen was the distillation of a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.

“if your new software no longer runs on old hardware, it is worse than the old software.”

Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash‐up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution. Digital Humanities means iterative scholarship, mobilized collaborations, and networks of research. It honors the quality of results; but it also honors the steps by means of which results are obtained... See more

I was supposed to be the example. I was supposed to be the good influence. It was only a matter of time until there was a division between “I should do this” and “I want to do that.” In my youth, there is the universal idea that my enjoyment always comes at the cost of someone else’s despair. How can you rest when your neighbor is working?