Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow. When the nerds upon Nerd Hill fight to the death over Vi and Emacs, it’s partly because they have such a strong affinity for the flow of the application and its meldiness. They have invested. The Tool Is Good, so they feel. Not breaking flow is an axiom of great tools.
A typewriter is an excellent tool because, even though it’s slow in a relative sense, every aspect of the machine itself operates as quickly as the user can move. It is focused. There are no delays when making a new line or slamming a key into the paper. Yes, you have to put a new sheet of paper into the machine at the end of a page, but that action becomes part of the flow of using the machine, and the accumulation of paper a visual indication of work completed. It is not wasted work. There are no fundamental mechanical delays in using the machine. The best software inches ever closer to the physical directness of something like a typewriter.
Craig Mod
Category Archives: Quotes
An Argument Against Abridged Versions
In covering The Social Contract, we will do close reads of a few passages. Some of those passages will be easy and some will be hard. However, learning to speak philosophy requires not only the close work of interpretation but prolonged general exposure to it. Put another way, learning to read difficult books requires not only quality time but quantity time.
If there are long passages in today’s reading that you don’t get, don’t tell yourself, ‘I don’t get this book’ and give up. The truth is, you’re not going to get many parts the book, but this book is worth reading for the portions that you do get. If we didn’t cover the difficult parts, you would never get to a place that you could understand them.
Josh Gibbs
This is why, in my 7th grade Humanities class, I assign the entirety of the Odyssey.
What It Means to be Reformed
The Reformation, whether led by Luther or Calvin, was a full-fledged liturgical reformation. You didn’t just come to Geneva in the 1500’s to learn doctrine; you came to learn how to worship God. You came to be formed into a worshipping community. You were trained to sing. To sing your faith. To sing the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. To sing the Te Deum. To sing your prayers. To sing the Lord’s Prayer. Especially, to sing the inspired hymnbook of the Church, the Psalter. You were trained in a new manner of living fitting for the Gospel. You were trained to be incorporated into a Christian army of Psalm-singing worshipers. You came to Geneva or Wittenberg or Strasburg in the mid-sixteenth century and you experienced what Paul meant in Colossians 3:16, “Let the word of Christ richly dwell among you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” This is what it means to be a Reformation Christian. You are a singing Christian, a participant in a congregation of singing, justified believers.
Jeff Meyers, The Lord’s Service
The People Vote with their Dollars
A man (said he) who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
Ignorant of Greatness, Historically Alone
This means that typical freshmen entering college lack the texts of their potential humanity, even their spiritual survival. They will also face, possibly before they graduate, surely before they are thirty or forty, the loss of close friends or a family member, the loss of love, disappointed hopes. Ignorant of those heroes of ancient Greece, ignorant of Biblical heroes, ignorant of greatness, they will think themselves historically alone, confronting a new condition unaccompanied.
John Silber, Straight Shooting
I hope that one day even these ignorant will realize they don’t have to face the future unaccompanied. They will want, and will find, words to suit the moment.
What is “Tech?”
Once upon a time, the word “technology” might have been applied to something such as a new design element that reduces frictional losses in a gear set. Today, the word is often shortened to “tech” and it typically means: finding new ways to insert a layer of fussiness into some aspect of life that is not yet subject to
Matthew Crawfordfussiness“optimization”, and then collecting rents from the friction this introduces.
Books and Children
It occurs to me that everything that can be said against the inconvenience of books can be said about the inconvenience of children. They too take up space, are of no immediate practical use, are of interest to only a few people, and present all kinds of problems. They too must be warehoused efficiently, and brought with as little resistance as possible into the Digital Age.
Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
Or, One Might Say, for Good Work
The present is a time not for ease or pleasure, but for earnest and prayerful work.
J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism
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To Feel How Feeling Feels
Being low to the ground is core to childhood. Children like to talk about worms; they live in a world of dirt and asphalt, their hands are always wet. Their mental life evolves in light of the nearness of the corporeal world, the world of things. Their nursery rhymes tell stories about beasts and wood. Their classrooms are festooned with images of animals, abstracted, made palatable for young eyes. Their world is visceral and new. They touch things just to touch them, to feel how feeling feels.
Freddie deBoer
Mythopoeic Promiscuity
In embracing mythopoeic promiscuity, [C. S.] Lewis was also following in the footsteps of his “master” MacDonald. In the fifth chapter of Phantastes we get the myth of Pygmalion, and in the sixth Anodos encounters Sir Percival; MacDonald is perfectly happy to have a wide range of mythological, legendary, and literary worlds knocking against one another. And if I were to make a defense of this procedure, I’d begin by noting that a great many myths and tales and legends are always knocking against one another in our own heads.
Alan Jacobs
Once again, I’m put in mind of Edmund Spenser. If there are any rules governing which mythical, legendary, or literary characters may or may not appear in The Faerie Queene, I haven’t discovered them. But, of course, that’s one of the things that makes it so wonderful.
Christian Leithart 