Remember a few months ago when I suggested that reading was still a worthwhile activity for the American public? Well, this report seems to support that idea (as if we needed the extra confirmation, right?) To wit: Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside, Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to…
"Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and…
Even if I were not already a hard core fan of the Economist, I’d think this was a Great Idea: More than 160 years of articles from the Economist are set to become available online with the launch of The Economist Historical Archive 1843-2003. The archive will contain more than 600,000 pages of the weekly…
Here’s one for rare book collectors around the world: Vatican Publishes Knights Templar Papers. Enjoy!
Everything is is chaos. If you own a house with a mortgage you may lose it if you’re not careful. The FDIC may not do much to preserve your bank account if push comes to shove. The financial elites are wrecking what’s left of the economy, the ex-spooks are suggesting that the rabble can analyze…
The story is here. I won’t make any jokes about how much room they’ll need to house both books, but I am wondering of the book about the pet goat will be part of the collection. I’m pretty sure that Richard Clarke’s book about what went on prior to 9/11 won’t be, but that’s the…
I don’t think there’s anything to say about this story from Yahoo! News other than to suggest that it’s not good news for the future of the country: "One in four adults say that they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who…
We’re officially beginning the migration of our catalog from a 13-year old in-house server whose performance can only be called "less than satisfactory"–I’d use stronger language considering what I’ve heard about the device’s past history both at the technical and political level, but I’ve only been here a couple of months (not even) and speaking…
In the interest of making genuine news available to anyone who wants it, I came across this article a short time ago and have decided to link it here. It’s not so much that I believe every word that Putin says, so much as I despise censorship and I haven’t seen this stuff anywhere locally.…
This comes from Bruce Mehlman and Larry Irving writing for the Sacramento Bee: The exponential explosion of digital content on the Internet is striking. YouTube.com alone consumes as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet consumed in 2000. Users upload 65,000 new videos every day and download 100 million files daily, a 1,000 percent increase…