Fungible Convictions

The prince – Google Books.

Slashdot News Story | Publishers Campaign For Universal E-Book Format.

But I didn’t grow up reading texts. I grew up reading books.

via Editorial Notebook – Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader – NYTimes.com.

Today we said a sad goodbye to the greatest of all vehicles, a 1991 Ford Explorer: the Wee Beastie.

Even after more than 100,000 miles, the Beastie never complained, always performed, and even once saved my life, hurtling down I-93 to get Lindsay to Somerville and me, soon there after, to a good hospital.

It was the car my wife learned to drive on. She and her sister both drove it during college. It drove on the beaches of East Hampton and in the snowdrifts of Cambridge and, countless times, along the roads between us and our families.

Two weeks ago, though, after one of those trips visiting family, the Beastie had some trouble. Our mechanic, who loved the Beastie nearly as much as we did, told us what it would take to make it better…and then we knew. It was time, after nineteen years in Lindsay’s family, to part with it.

So today the American Cancer Society “Cars for Cures” program arranged for a truck to come by and accept our donation of one 1991 Ford Explorer. I watched the driver load up the Beastie along with other donated cars…

…and I watched the Beastie go:

We love you, Beastie.

El Vética: luchero meets typographer – Boing Boing.

Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American” could well serve as the dividing line for two Americas: one that places patriotism above reason and another that places reason above patriotism. Each has its place, its purpose, and its good and bad.

For all the noise about Tea Partiers, the best-intentioned of them fall squarely in the first camp, for whom the lyrics of “Proud to Be an American” make intuitive sense. They would argue—I would say illogically but sincerely—that freedom from overbearing government is paramount, even if it means dying a young, miserable, painful death from lung cancer because the free market couldn’t offer you the affordable health insurance necessary for an early, actionable diagnosis. The line “Where at least I know I’m free” frustrates that second camp (for example, the city government of Washington, D.C., ) to no end, because it’s a way of saying, “I don’t care that our bad health care and prevalence of guns means we die sooner than everyone in western Europe, because at least my life is more free from government control than theirs.” It frustrates the second camp because it’s illogical: how can you enjoy freedom if you’re dead?

But to the reason-above-patriotism camp, the line “who gave that right to me” is even more vexing. Rights can’t be given by man. Certainly not by “the men who died”. Rights are natural; you’re born with them. They come from God. It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence: “…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Dying on the beaches of Normandy or on Lexington Green did nothing to “give” rights. Certainly they were defended, but not given.

It’s an important distinction, because it’s what gives the patriotism-above-reason camp a peg on which to hang accusations of being unpatriotic, the classic “If you question the mission our soldiers are engaged in, you must therefore be unpatriotic.” The reason-above-patriotism camp retorts, “But what’s the point of sacrifice if what soldiers are dying for is meaningless or counterproductive?”

The irony is that both camps believe they are both fully patriotic and reasonable. Yet neither are. And sometimes it takes a thoroughly loved and hated song by Lee Greenwood to illustrate it.

I read with my wife’s Amazon Kindle for the first time tonight, and I have to be honest, I didn’t like it very much. These are the things I don’t understand about it:

• Why did Amazon choose a slab serif font as its universal typeface? While Caecilia is a lovely typeface, slab serifs are about as pleasant for long-session reading as sans serifs, that is, not very.
• Why didn’t they style the subheads or, quite confusingly, the pullquotes?
• Why didn’t they use “keep” settings so that there aren’t widow or orphan lines?
• Was there no other way to represent progress through a book other than that meter at the bottom of the screen?

These are aesthetic concerns, yes, but they have a lot to do with how I read, process, and remember stories and information. I have no confidence in my ability to remember something I’ve read on a Kindle, because there are no design cues to help me collate what I read. Turning letters into narrative or knowledge needs a storyteller or a teacher, functions good design have traditionally served…that is, functions books have traditionally served.

Coming as I do from remarkably hard-working parents, the question “Do I fear work?” has nagged at me for years. It nags at me because my parents are hard-working: their example both makes it essentially genetic that I’ll work harder than other people but as a son means I’ve learned their lesson and will be protective of my downtime.

Thus it means I get into the office first every day and I get an enormous amount of work done. But it also means I block my office webmail on my home computer and take all my vacation days.

This balance has one bad feature in particular. I tend to read books far less than I used to, because reading feels like work. When reading was work, like in grad school, I read a ton.

I dunno, just a fragment of a fuller thought somewhere out there. I just want to figure out why my leisure activities—working on Readsfeed for example—are so much like work, when actual play, whether it’s reading or bike riding or softball, are things I’d like to do but don’t.

I’ve been there only the past two, but what an amazing ten years CMS has had. For the past few months, I’ve been putting together a history of the program, which is available at cms.mit.edu and on Scribd:

CMS 10th Anniversary

On Friday we held an all-day symposium, featuring about 40 alums, this year’s ten graduate students, and dozens of guests from around MIT. But the highlight by far was on Thursday, when we welcomed back former CMS director Henry Jenkins for a Communications Forum, where he spoke of a career at MIT. I happened to be sitting directly behind the Dean, who briefly shrank to almost nothing when Henry’s first words were, “I hate this fucking place!”, not realizing he was citing the old MIT student slogan (since adopted by other institutions, including the military service academies).

Video and audio of everything from the anniversary will be available next week, but for now enjoy Henry’s amazing talk: http://cms.mit.edu/news/2010/04/podcast_communications_forum_j.php