Awesome: visualizations of famous movie quotes, via kottke.

What is the worst sentence you ever wrote?

The David Foster Wallace audio project.

Speaking of whom, you’ve probably already heard that UT-Austin recently acquired Wallace’s archive. But it’s worth a mention here regardless, if only because of these doodles David Foster Wallace drew on Cormac McCarthy’s face: Read more »

The press is declaring that digital will overtake print within the decade. The visions that this news inspires are numerous and, occasionally, bizarre: a subway full of commuters with heads bowed over e-readers instead of morning newspapers, libraries with dozens of empty bookshelves hovering ghostlike behind radiating computers, multimedia diginovels with holograms jumping off every page. And that may only be the beginning.

So let’s engage in a thought experiment. Here is a world I have envisioned, wherein society has wholly purged itself of paperbound books, and digital readers have become the norm. Some of the events I will describe sound a little outrageous, but then again, some events have already come to pass. It’s a brave new (digital) world: Read more »

I’m just going to say it: as much as I love technology, I feel uneasy about the Kindle.

Yes, I realize there are some good things about it: compared to printed books, digital books are better for the environment; you can virtually carry around an entire library in your pocket (no pun intended, heh); and you can even read blogs on the device. For example, you might want to use the Kindle to read a certain blog you are viewing now…? Read more »