“For most people, the summer of 2011 was bullshit. Business slowed down noticeably, a few friends and neighbors got laid off while no one was hired, and for some reason there was a Thor and a Captain America and a Green Lantern movie out at the same time and we still can’t figure out why.”

— The Reformed Broker (via pegobry)

(via pegobry)

(Reblogged from pegobry)

8:04 am  •  September 2, 2011  •  View comments

“The education of ‘nontraditional’ students has been a subject fraught with cognitive dissonance in America, where much of the discussion surrounding higher education is unduly preoccupied with matters of prestige and exclusivity. In this context, leaders of for-profit colleges have held up their neglected, underserved student populations as a badge of moral seriousness. ‘What we do is educate people who would never have a shot, thank you very much,’ a former Kaplan executive said in a recent Washington Post article. In effect, the for-profit schools have accused their prestigious critics of looking at the world of working-class, adult students and saying, for all intents and purposes, ‘Let them eat cake.’ And despite their many flaws, the for-profits have a point here. That’s why the country needs more institutions like Western Governors — innovative, low-cost schools offering degrees of demonstrable value — that put both the snobs and the profiteers to shame.”

— I’m not saying I didn’t love St. John’s, but the example of Western Governors University looks more like the future of education than anything involving the liberal arts — and that’s a good thing. On the other hand, I think it’d be really cool if more schools adopted the model of Deep Springs College and built their curricula around “the three pillars of academics, labor, and self-governance”.

(Source: washingtonmonthly.com)

3:25 pm  •  August 30, 2011  •  View comments

“I don’t intend to dismiss the idea that we can all make somewhat better choices which will marginally nudge the world in the right direction, but your self-righteousness will not, in fact, save the world. Your choice to be a vegetarian, or not own a car, or stick a solar panel on your roof, doesn’t even necessarily mean that your actual contribution to destroying the world is particularly low relative to other people. You’ve probably made some other world destroying choices.”

— Atrios. We’re so used to thinking in terms of personal morality that the idea of a social morality, with its own rules and folkways, is alien to us.

(Source: eschatonblog.com)

2:07 pm  •  August 29, 2011  •  View comments

“Probably one of the most disastrous side-effects for the long-term unemployed is the attendant anomie. By and large you begin living outside of society, outside of its rhythms, outside of its collective wisdom. Your futile job hunt begins to highlight the capriciousness with which punishments and rewards are doled out. Progressives pay lip service to the way marginal distinctions can grow into yawning inequalities, but I think in the end its something you can only comprehend fully through lived experience. Each job you are not hired for creates an ever growing gap on your resume and makes it all the more likely that you won’t be hired after your next interview. As these anxieties grow, you become more ambivalent about looking for work because you know that what you should be focused on isn’t searching for a job tomorrow, but erasing the job hunt from yesterday.”

—

What You Don’t Know About the Job Search: Responses From the Jobless

Want to share your joblessness story? Send us a note at aboutmyjob1@gmail.com, tweet us @TheAtlantic with the tag #AboutMyJob, or submit a post.

(via theatlantic)

(via pegobry)

(Reblogged from theatlantic)

8:54 am  •  August 29, 2011  •  219 notes  •  View comments

Include a “Random Page” button. I seldom read paper books, even novels, sequentially¹; I like to dive into something that seems interesting and then move from there to the rest of the text. But on a Kindle or other e-reader, that’s not really possible, save for typing in a random search term or something like that. Amazon, B&N, Apple: Take a lesson from the “random post” feature on Tumblr and make serendipitous reading possible again.

6:27 pm  •  August 27, 2011  •  View comments

Note: This post started out as a standard kvetching about text editors and word processors, but somewhere along the way veered into questions about technology, innovation, and standardization. Caveat lector.

Let’s talk text editors, shall we? It seems like writing software these days has become focused on answering two needs:

1. Fullness of features, as epitomized by mainstream word processors like Microsoft Word and Nisus Writer, but also innovative applications like Scrivener; and
2. Lack of distractions, as embodied by WriteRoom and its countless imitators — a trend that has come in for some deserved mockery.

These are worthy things to consider in developing writing software, but lately I’ve been obsessed with a third consideration, which most word processors and text editors don’t really address at all: touch-type editing. I don’t just mean typing words from the home row, I mean navigating and manipulating the text without moving your hands from the home row. Standard keyboard layouts tend to stick important keys like Page Up/Down and Home/End, not to mention the Control key, in the corners. Not only does this force someone writing to disrupt their flow to use those keys, it’s ergonomically unsuitable as well.

What’s interesting about this is that the few programs that do allow for touch-type editing all come from the time before IBM’s Model M keyboard became the standard layout for PCs in the late 1980s: Emacs, Vim, and WordStar, to name three. Two of these are old-as-the-hills text editors used almost exclusively by programmers; one is a modal editor that even many programmers don’t understand; and one doesn’t even exist anymore.¹

For me, it’s a reminder that technology isn’t just a matter of innovation, but also of standardization: The adoption of USB, for example, was perhaps as big a development in the history of computing as the debut of the iPhone. And while standardization is a good and important thing, it does tend to close off certain paths that could be fruitful. From a writer’s perspective, at least, the WordStar diamond, along with placing the Control key next to the A key, really does make more sense than the current PC layout and keyboard shortcuts; but for various reasons², that system lost. Competing standards is usually viewed as a problem (for example), but I think there’s a case to be made that some measure of discord or weirdness is inevitable in technology, and perhaps should even be welcomed. After all, if technology is in fact an extension of ourselves, how could we not expect some discord or weirdness to emerge?

12:06 pm  •  August 27, 2011  •  View comments

Waiting for Irene to hit, it’s a Leadbelly kind of morning. (“Goodnight Irene” would be kind of obvious, no?)

9:51 am  •  August 27, 2011  •  View comments