I Sing the Trousers Electric
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A new Levi’s advertisement uses a wax-cylinder recording of what is believed to be Walt Whitman reciting his own poem. Of course, it’s by no means Whitman’s first trousers ad — O soul in […]
Read This PostAuthor: Matthew Battles
Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.
Domesticating the Uncanny Valley
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In one version of an oft-repeated thought experiment, Douglas Hofstadter famously wondered if Albert Einstein’s brain (well, anyone’s brain, really) could be reformatted as a book, with each neuron represented by a page printed with […]
Read This PostThe Future Thinks We Suck
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As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, a pair of physicists have offered a novel theory to explain the troubles bedeviling the Large Hadron Collidor, the world’s most powerful — and to date, […]
Read This Postthe best book ever (results)
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I asked you to describe the ideal book, one that would save the publishing world and the public sphere in one stroke. And with responses pouring in — nearly three dozen of them — it's […]
Read This PostThor Heyerdahl
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THOR HEYERDAHL (1914–2002) lived a long life, but so much was left undone: he might have piloted an ice floe from Porvoo to Hokkaido to prove Finland’s nomadic Sami peopled Japan; he might have shown […]
Read This PostAutotune the Universe
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Electronica composer John Boswell remixes the preambles and perorations of Carl Sagan for a groovy take on the wonder-struck spiritual cosmology at the heart of the landmark PBS series Cosmos. With a guest appearance by […]
Read This PostWill Shortz & the Death of the Author
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Listening to NPR yesterday morning for the first time in a month of Sundays, I caught the puzzle segment with Will Shortz. While Will and Liane engaged in their smile-weary repartée and my wife sorted […]
Read This PostThe Best Book Ever
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In the 1990s, the artists Komar and Melamid began polling art lovers to discover the world’s ideal painting. I’m curious to learn whether we can use similar methods to discover the ideal book. The short […]
Read This PostRockbound
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I can’t decide whether this is evidence of the book’s staying power, or a sign that its end is near: to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing, the art publisher Taschen has […]
Read This PostInfinite Liberal Arts
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I’ve been a mere lurker at Infinite Summer, the online book club which sprang up to honor the late David Foster Wallace by exploring his magnum opus, Infinite Jest. Thousands of people have participated in […]
Read This PostOnly Connect
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Last week the New York Times’s occasional “Op-Art” column was furnished by Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty, whose handwriting manuals explain and promote the italic hand. In “Write Stuff,” they offer italic as a balm […]
Read This PostTHE BOOK: TERMS OF SERVICE
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THE BOOK Terms of Service Statement of Rights and Responsibilities This statement of the terms of service of The Book is derived from principles of the public sphere, covered in the U.N. Declaration of Human […]
Read This PostMonkey Science Roundup
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Monkeys are making news across the world of science. As we discussed last week, researchers discovered that tamarin monkeys prefer music composed for them. Yesterday, Science Daily reported a study in which monkeys were found […]
Read This PostMusic for Cats of All Kinds
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We’ve been reading news today about music composed for monkeys. Most animals don’t respond to music. But is that because music per se is incomprehensible to them, or because it’s customarily created from the spectrum […]
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