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brownstudy — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:00:52 +0000

Susie Bright asks: What makes a person change the course of their life?
Why bother learning stuff?
Social Media Venn diagram
As he turns in his dissertation, Cal Newport (of Study Hacks blog fame) reflects on his grad-school experience
A thought on the university as “an ethically superior institution”
James Fallows is back in the US after several years reporting in China, and has this priceless quote in his blog post about the healthcare “debate”:

Pretty soon I will lay off the “As a Rip van Winkle returnee to your country, what I notice is….” approach. But I have to say that it is striking to come back — from the world of controlled media and not-always-accurate “official truth” in China — and see the world’s most mature democracy, informed by the world’s dominant media system, at a time of perceived economic crisis and under brand new political leadership, getting tied up by manufactured misinformation. No matter what party you belong to, you can’t think this is a sign of health for the Republic.

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Links 25-May-2008

brownstudy — Mon, 26 May 2008 02:17:05 +0000

Penelope Trunk has an excellent post on how she got her current favorite mentor, to complement her other posts on the topic. As a forty-odder among twenty-somethings, I find that my mentors are not just the professors, but my peers who have longer experience of being a student, being at SILS, being connected to many other students who they think may be good for me to meet. I have a couple of trusted mentors — including, of course, The Illimitable Cassidy — both 20 years younger than me, who provide me with excellent advice and guidance. I hope to be of use to them one day, or to pay it forward in some way.

I recall an author reading I went to years ago; she’d written a book about the Book of the Month club. Her opinion at that time was that literate book-culture was seeing its history growing smaller in a rearview mirror, hence the explosion of books about books, books about reading, books about bibliophiles. There’s a strong flavor of sadness and melancholy in these books. I thought of this when reading the UK Guardian review of Alberto Manguel’s “The Library at Night”:

The traditional library was a citadel sacred to the notion of omniscience; the web, by contrast, is ‘the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence’, like a supermarket that boundlessly proliferates in space and deluges the planet with its tacky wares. ‘The library that contained everything,’ Manguel laments, ‘has become the library that contains anything.’

In junior high school, I got hooked on the Doc Savage novels with the James Bama covers. William Denton somehow located the author Lester Dent’s Master Fiction Plot Formula for any 6000-word story. While you’re there, check out William’s library science pages. And I’ll probably try his index card system for organizing my school work this fall. Update: I tried it for a while but it duplicated other systems for tracking work and reading that were more convenient, so I dropped it.

Susie Bright is looking for odd book titles. (Susie’s site is fun, but its ads could be classified as NSFW.)

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Links 25-May-2008