Posts Tagged ‘research’
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”*…
… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
Reunderstanding reading: “Books and screens,” from @carloiacono.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
“The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down”*…
It’s that time of year again: the 2025 IgNobel Awards have been awarded. Jennifer Ouellette reports…
Does alcohol enhance one’s foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes… when the serious and the silly converge—for science.
Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.
Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website…
Read on for accounts (each both amusing and fascinating) of this year’s winners: “Meet the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners,” @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social in @arstechnica.com.
More at the web site of Improbable Research— “research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK”– the organization behind the IgNobels.
* Adam Savage (@asavage.bsky.social)
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As we have some serious fun, we might we might spare a thought for a man who embodied the marriage of science and glee: Ron Toomer; he died on this date in 2011. Toomer began his career as an aeronautical engineer who contributed to the heat shields on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft. But in 1965, he joined Arrow Development, an amusement park ride design company, where he became a legendary creator of steel roller coasters. His first assignment was “The Run-Away Mine Train” (at Six Flags Over Texas), the first “mine train” ride, and the second steel roller coaster (after Arrow’s Matterhorn Ride at Disneyland). Toomer went on to design 93 coasters worldwide, and was especially known for his creation of the first “inversion” coasters (he built the first coasters with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, loops). In 2000, he was inducted in the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Hall of Fame as a “Living Legend.”
“Our research universities are the best in the world. But a leadership position is easy to lose and difficult to regain.”…
Revisiting a key topic that we’ve touched before…
The modern U.S. research universities arose in the late 19th century. Their work has laid the foundation for major advances in health and medicine, technology, communications, agriculture/food, economics, energy, and national security at the same time that they have educated students to be scientific, technical, commerical, and cultural leaders and innovators.
Today, as a product of what historians have called a “virtuous circle of incentives and resources,” American academic research institutions are top of the pops… and not at all coincidentally, so is the U.S economy:
… But that dominance is under attack, both by the Trump Administration and by state governments around the country actively undermining the work of their state universities.
It’s worth remembering that, into the early twentieth century, German Universities– the original models for the American approach— dominated the list.
As the U.S. increasingly models the behavior of German authorities in the 1930s, the vital contributions of research univerisities are at risk.
When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, the leaders of America’s most august universities didn’t all comport themselves as one might have wished. We can only hope that this time– as the threat is aimed directly at them– they will respond more strongly and directly.
Meantime, we can all add our voices to the defense of academic freedom and support for vital research.
* Research Universities and the Future of America, a report from The National Research Council, 2012 (Page 68)
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As we cease self-sabotage, we might spare a thought for a professorial paragon of the virtues of the institutions in question (in his case, on the cultural as opposed to the scientific/technical front), George Lyman Kittredge, a professor at Harvard; he died on this date in 1941. Kittredge’s edition of Shakespeare’s work was the scholarly standard in the early 20th century; he promoted the study of folklore and folk songs (encouraging students like John A. Lomax, and thus Lomax’s son, Alan); and he was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press.
“I didn’t study theology out of piety. I studied it because I wanted to know.”*…
Beatrice Marovich on a discipline declining…
People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: theologians often have a complicated relationship with belief, and some theologians are even non-believers. I’ve always been a secular—or non-religious—person. That’s the “tradition” I was raised in. But I’m also a theologian.
I knew that it was a risk, going into the field of theology. There are conversations I’ve been shut out of because I’m not religious enough. And I’m often marked as a troubling outsider by scholars who see themselves taking a purely secular approach to the interdisciplinary study of religion. But as a graduate student, and even early in my career as a faculty member at a small liberal arts college, I believed the field of theology was opening up, and becoming more complex. It felt, to me, as if there were a creative disintegration happening that might make more room for scholars like me. But after more than a decade in the field, I’ve come to feel that something else is happening instead. It feels like the field is dying.
People are still doing theology in public (if, by doing theology we mean talking about gods, spirits, and other divine powers). But the field I was trained in as a scholar—academic theology—feels like it’s dying. It’s a field that’s often philosophical, but always theoretical. Because of this, theology can verge quickly into the abstract, and the speculative. Theologians might make use of anthropological, sociological, and historical studies of religion. But they tend not to feel beholden to any of those disciplines. Indeed, theologians are often wading into explicitly interdisciplinary conversations about science, politics, gender, and race (among other things). In its lack of clear focus, theology might be the most undisciplined discipline in the American academy today. And that undisciplined discipline feels like it’s dying. At least to me.
But is theology really dying? Or is this just the feeling I have, as I’m being squeezed out of the field? Or, perhaps I’m I fixated on the mortality of this collective project because I’ve been writing, thinking, and teaching about death. When I looked at enrollment numbers at seminaries and theological schools, the numbers aren’t necessarily damning. At least not yet. They don’t necessarily confirm my feeling, or my mood. Neither did Sean Larsen’s 2020 State of Theology study, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. There were people, in that study, who remained optimistic about the discipline’s prospects. And while Ted Smith’s 2023 book The End of Theological Education does acknowledge that the institutions that built theology in America are collapsing, he remains optimistic about what the church can do for the future of theology.
I needed to know if others shared my feeling, or mood. So, I decided to have a conversation with my colleagues. I reached out to people in my network, to see who felt compelled to weigh in. I had three questions for them: Is academic theology really dying? If so, how do you feel about this death? And, finally, If you could save one thing from the sinking ship that is academic theology, what would it be? This essay is a kind of report: it’s what my colleagues told me.
What you’ll read here does reflect a bias: these are voices from within my network. Nevertheless, I think their words are worth sharing. Whether or not academic theology is really dying, it may still be worth thinking about its mortality. If I’ve learned any lesson from writing and thinking about death, it’s that when we acknowledge that it’s there, when we remember that we’re always living in death’s shadows, we take what’s in front of us much more seriously. We can see the full fragility of things, and we can try—against the odds—to resist entropy and protect what we think is worth saving, inheriting, or carrying on into the future. And we can think about what we’re ready to let go of. Because all things, in time, do die. It’s only a question of when…
[Marovich examines the state of the field v ia a recounting of highlights from her conversations with colleagues…]
… I conducted these interviews in the spring of 2024, in what feels to me (now) like a different world. What David Kline so succinctly described as the “institutional frameworks for intellectual life” seem more fragile and threatened than ever, as the Trump administration rapidly defunds education and research, and attacks media outlets. And we can’t forget, of course, about the many threats that Artificial Intelligence—in the form of Large Language Models like ChatGPT—poses to these fragile frameworks for intellectual life. I’m aware that it may seem small-minded and naïve to worry about my own obscure little academic discipline, when the whole structure is falling apart. So, it does seem important for me to clarify that I have spent (and will continue to spend) many hours grieving, as if in anticipation, what feels like the evaporation of intellectual possibilities—intellectual life itself!—in America. I am torn up about all of this. And yet, simultaneously, I do remain concerned about the strange little ecosystem that comprises my corner of the world.
As I think over these conversations with my colleagues, I find myself torn between letting go and holding on—or, perhaps better said, trying to hold space. I agree with Hanna Reichel when they suggest that letting go of the growth mindset is painful and difficult for Americans, perhaps more than anyone else. And this contributes to so much of the damage that American life does to the planet we share with others. I recognize that this is a problem. And I am compelled by Colby Dickinson’s suggestion that perhaps learning to die—learning an ars moriendi—might be the best thing that theology could do right now. So much of what is good about theology is probably already in diaspora, as Amaryah Armstrong has suggested. I do have a certain kind of faith that much of the power of theology will live on, in some shape and form, wherever it goes.
And yet Sameer Yadav’s point about academic theology existing as a kind of “nowhere” space strikes me as so deeply true. That nowhere space has given me so much room to explore, it’s opened dimensions of life to me that I would never have seen, and it’s introduced me to so many incredible people—living and dead. I am grateful for this community, and I feel like I owe it something. I feel compelled to somehow preserve that generative and undisciplined nowhere space for others. Like Meg Mercury, I would like to see this nowhere space open up and expand, for those people who don’t feel as if they belong in traditional religious structures. And yet, I also recognize that the cash value of this sort of space—for the church and for the academy—is more or less zero. The odds that it will survive, even if (as David Congdon noted) there is some educational New Deal that revives higher education, are slim. But perhaps this is one of the reasons why I felt compelled to speak with my colleagues, and write this piece, in the first place. Perhaps it was a gesture at letting go. Or perhaps it was a little leap of faith—a little gesture towards expanding space and time for this nowhere community to find new forms of shelter in which to gather…
On doing hospice care for an academic discipline: “Is Theology Dying?” from @beamarovich.bsky.social in The Other Journal.
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As we ponder the preservation of perspicacity, we might send controversial birthday greetings to a man whose experience illustrates (one episode in) the long history of theology’s peril, Bernard Lamy; he was born on this date in 1640. A French Oratorian and mathematician, he was was also an important theologian… whose teachings were judged alternately either controversial or irrelevent at the series of institutions to which he was forced continually to move throughout his career.
“The pencil is mightier than the pen”*…
Carson Monetti on an industrial rivalry that yielded the finest pencils in the world…
It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow’s managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at enormous cost, to make the best pencil Japan had ever seen.
It was called “HOMO,” because in comparison with other Japanese pencils of its day, Tombow’s new model had a much more homogenous core. Pencil cores are a mixture of graphite and clay (thanks to Nicolas-Jacques Conté’s invention of the modern pencil in the late eighteenth century), and the components in early cores were not always evenly mixed. This was particularly true in Japan, where pencils had only been made since the turn of the century and advanced industrial equipment was just starting to become available.
Hachiro’s team at Tombow was determined to do whatever it took to produce more consistent cores. They struck up a working relationship with scientists at the University of Tokyo, a visionary move that yielded crucial technical research in 1948. Then, to implement the research findings, Tombow had to import more advanced industrial mills from the United States.
It was a gamble, but it worked, and suddenly Tombow could make much finer particles of graphite and clay than any other Japanese manufacturer. HOMO cores were stronger, smoother, and more consistent than anything else on the domestic market. They came in 17 grades, from 9H to 9B, a wide and finely graduated range that hadn’t been possible with Tombow’s old process.
They were also incredibly beautiful. Another import that had become available in the wake of World War II was incense cedar, the material of choice for high-quality pencils. Most of the pencil industry’s incense cedar comes from California, and Tombow quickly restarted its imports of the aromatic red wood. HOMO’s design takes full advantage of the material upgrade, with a subtle transparent lacquer that highlights the cedar’s color and grain.
For Hachiro Ogawa and his father Harunosuke, the completion of the HOMO project was the culmination of a dream, and it was undoubtedly a pioneering moment in Japanese industry. But as the company prepared to introduce HOMO at the grand Tokyo Kaikan meeting hall, the skeptics must have been hard to ignore. In the early 1950s, a Japanese pencil cost five or ten yen (about 25-50 cents in 2022 dollars.) Tombow’s technical leap forward had produced a model far superior to those inexpensive pencils, but they would also be pioneers in price. HOMO would cost 30 yen (about $1.50 today) for a single pencil, with boxes of twelve priced at 360 yen (about $19 today.)
Japanese consumers weren’t used to spending that kind of money on a pencil. But if Hachiro, Harunosuke, and their colleagues were nervous, their fears were surely resolved at the first-ever Tombow New Product Presentation. Tokyo Kaikan was the esteemed meeting place of foreign dignitaries, corporate titans, even heads of state—and now it was absolutely bustling with stationery wholesalers, curious people from other companies, and the press. Tombow took orders for 720,000 HOMO pencils on launch day alone.
Tombow’s surprising success with Japan’s first premium pencil, along with the ambition and competitive spirit of midcentury manufacturers, led to the most intense period of development the global pencil industry has ever seen.
We call it the Golden Age of Japanese Pencils.
The Golden Age began and ended with two Tombow launches: Hachiro’s pioneering HOMO launch in 1952 and the MONO 100 launch in 1967, fifteen years later. During this period, Tombow and its crosstown rival Mitsubishi Pencil created many of the greatest pencils of all time, including the two best-regarded models offered today…
[Monetti tells the story of that fertile period…]
… although Mitsubishi and Tombow didn’t know in advance that the Japanese pencil industry would reach its peak in 1966, both companies clearly saw it coming, and they had already prepared themselves for a future beyond pencils. One wonders why both companies continued to expend research and development resources on high-end pencils in the late 1960s, but they did—and on a personal note, this sometimes inexplicable tendency of Japanese manufacturers to perfect what doesn’t need to be perfected is a major reason why we’re so passionate about our Japanese imports…
[More detail…]
… In this pencil merchant’s opinion, there’s simply no need for a pencil more perfect than the best of Japan’s Golden Age. We can admire the heady moment and the strong personalities who created these pencils, and we can be forgiven for daydreaming about the even-more-perfect pencil, the one that would make our handwriting beautiful and our drawings perfectly proportional.
But when I sit down to sharpen my pencil (usually a Hi-Uni HB or Mitsubishi 9852 “Master Writing” B), my primary feeling is gratitude. The designers and engineers who created these tools didn’t know they would be made for 70 years, but they treated their seemingly small task with intense seriousness of purpose, and that passion produced outstanding tools that have still not been surpassed. Today, in 2022, I frequently speak with artists who tell me how much these pencils inspire them and enable their best work.
So I’m not regretful about the end of the Golden Age of Pencils, because in the ways that matter most, it never ended. Mitsubishi, in particular, has loyally maintained its midcentury product line, continuing to manufacture its pencils in Japan and even adding a minor new model now and then. (There’s an antiviral-coated Mitsubishi in light blue, new for 2022.) Artists and writers still debate the merits of Hi-Uni and MONO 100.
And I can’t speak for everyone who works here [St. Louis Art Supply], but personally, I’m excited every time I ship a fresh, unsharpened dozen to a new customer. For them, the Golden Age is just getting started…
A celebration of dedicated craft: “The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967,” from @monetti.bsky.social, via Spencer Wright and his wonderful newsletter, Scope of Work.
See also: The Pencil, by Henry Petrosky
* Robert Pirsig (and here)
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As we find poetry in the prosaic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that the inaugural gathering of pencil users and their fans that we now know as San Diego Comic-Con was held. Originally called “San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Minicon,” it has grown into the the largest pop and culture festival in the world.
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