“Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.”
—Cyril Connolly, English journalist, born September 10, 1903
On Not Finishing Books
Once I went to the library on a Saturday morning and took out some books, came home, read them, and returned them in the afternoon, so I could get some more. I was seven or eight years old, and had just gotten my first library card.
It’s long been my belief that most of life is a set of more or less unpleasant chores that you have to get out of the way in order to get down to life’s real business: reading.
Now, I still read all the time, for pleasure and instruction. But I finish less and less of the books I start reading. Much of the reading I do is on the Internet, in the form of blog posts and other articles. There’s simply less time for books.
My attention span is also shorter, and my patience is limited. A book that starts to bore me gets abandoned. I guess I don’t feel any obligation to finish them anymore, as I once did. The scanning habit has become natural.
There seems to be more to read, too: as if a greater infinity of reading matter exists on the Internet than the already-infinite amount of stuff there was to read in libraries and bookstores, like Cantor’s distinction between the infinity of integers and the greater infinity of real numbers.
Events Today
Springfield—8:00AM–5:00PM Baystate Health Diversity & Inclusion Conference
Holyoke—8:30AM–10:30AM Grow Your Business with Email and Social Media Marketing
Northampton—5:30–7:00PM Five College Area Forum on Social Media and Women Business Owners
Northampton—6:00–8:00PM InCommN-Click Tuesday Workshop
Greenfield—6:00–8:00PM Creative Economy Networking
Read
There is no Shortage of STEM Workers
Which is what you should expect from looking at continued high unemployment and flat wages. Now why would anyone want us to think that there is a crisis? I’m glad you asked:
“…Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle. One is obvious: the bottom line. Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the ‘best and the brightest,’ and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to ‘suppress’ the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high….”
The STEM Crisis is a Myth
Looking at Ourselves
“…Britain’s Mass-Observation. Formed in 1937 as an experiment in social anthropology that combined art, social science, and documentary practices, Mass-Observation was the first concerted effort to research everyday lives of Britons through a decidedly radical approach that employed theories of psychology and anthropology, ideas from surrealism, and a heavy dose of socialism….In a letter published in the New Statesman in 1937, the group announced its intention of creating an ‘anthropology at home’ and ‘a science of ourselves’ and invited volunteers to help research in a range of mundane activities such as the ‘behavior of people at war memorials’ the ‘shouts and gestures of motorists’ and even the simple elements of bodily features such as ‘beards, armpits, and eyebrows.’…”
Avoiding “Literally”
“It’s happened. Literally the most misused word in the language has officially changed definition. Now as well as meaning ‘in a literal manner or sense; exactly: “the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the traffic circle”’, various dictionaries have added its other more recent usage. As Google puts it, ‘literally’ can be used ‘to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling’.”
Have We Literally Broken the English Language?
The Last Word
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” —Leo Tolstoy