Soon, many of you will be asked what you might want as a Hanukah or Christmas gift. Or, maybe you’ve already been asked by a Cyber-Monday-ing relative. Others may soon be on planes to or from Paris. So, what better time to evaluate this year’s crop of energy reads? Last year, I asked for suggestions … Continue reading »
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Good energy reading for the beach?
I used to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with my in-laws in Portland, Ore. A couple years ago, it snowed for two days straight, and the city shut down. My brother-in-law has taken it upon himself to find a warm-weather holiday destination for the family ever since. As I head for the … Continue reading »
The Free Speech Movement’s passionate readers
“Passionate readers” is not the tag line today for the people swept up in the Free Speech Movement, but it fits just as well as other efforts to sum them up. Thanks to the archives that the Library has built, serious students of the FSM know this. Margot Adler, a familiar voice on National Public Radio … Continue reading »
Potatoes in print
The University of California libraries have digitized millions of volumes and now will reprint the old ones, not covered by copyright, for anyone who wants to own them. “Mass digitization” and “Print-on-Demand” came together thanks to help from the wizards who run Google, the Internet Archive, Hewlett-Packard, and Amazon. But now that we are up … Continue reading »
Students can’t write (or read)
That’s what Berkeley faculty have been saying since 1884, when a Professor Bradley reported that fifteen students failed the entrance exam in writing, and that he spent the next day in “ceaseless interviews with the unfortunate, the lazy, and the feeble-minded.” I gleaned this quotation from an excellent book, The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement … Continue reading »