Monthly Archives: February 2012

Is YouTube a Gateway Drug to Twitter? Fixin’ to Find Out

For months — has it only been months? — UK neuroscientist and baronnes Susan Greenfield has been blasting Twitter and other social media for destroying the minds of the young. Today over at the invaluable Mind Hacks, the inestimable Vaughan Bell, who has tangled many times with Greenfield’s Twitter attacks,  brings us the latest development.…

Your Genome As Circus Clown: How DNA Packs Itself Small

One of my favorite blogs of late is The Last Word on Nothing, where several particularly literate, imaginative, restless, and thoughtful writers post on science, culture, and life. The most recent posts, for instance, consider science and music; magic; crying; and the universe, twice. Why think small? Yet today, actually, one of the regulars there, Virginia…

Why the Longform Boom? It’s the Data, Stupid

Over at Forbes, Lewis DVorkin, who once ran big bits of AOL, has written a fine smart post on the boom in longform stories on the web. The longform surge, both at magazine and newspaper sites and in new venues such as The Atavist, may seem surprising, but as DVorkin tells it, it’s surprising mainly in that…

David Foster Wallace’s Wincing Worries About Wisdom

John Jeremiah Sullivan on DFW, via David Quigg: It’s this quality, of being inwardly divided, that risks getting flattened and written out of (David Foster) Wallace’s story by his postmortem idolization, which would make of him a dispenser of wisdom. We should guard against that. We’ll lose the most essential Wallace, the one that is…

Elsevier Boycott Not a Petition, But “A Declaration of Independence”

So says computer programmer and sauropod fan  Mike Taylor in a particularly rich rallying cry at Discover’s “The Crux” blog. The ongoing boycott of academic-publishing giant Elsevier — almost 7000 researchers and counting — writes Bristol, [has] sometimes been described as a petition, but isn’t trying to persuade Elsevier to do something. It’s a declaration of independence.…