Previously I critiqued e-readers. In short, I argued they were functionality without a purpose. They just do not fit my media consumption needs. Today, Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post wrote of the architectural ramifications of the disappearance of books. It is an interesting architectural angle on the matter, and Kennicott also raises some...
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The July/August issue of Public Administration Review carries my lengthy review of Beth Simone Noveck’s Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institution Press, 2009). Noveck is the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director—the person heading the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative. In my review,...
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I have an op-ed in the Sunday, June 12, 2010 copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer that essays a provisional answer to this question. You may read the op-ed at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/. It builds upon my previous blog posts on this question. Call it a further step in my nascent effort at political sociology on the...
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On Wednesday, June 2, 2010, the Common Core Standards for English and mathematics were released. They can be downloaded from this web page: http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards. Sam Dillon of the New York Times writes, The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and refined in recent weeks in response to some of the...
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John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). The publisher describes it thus: Only weeks after the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, a surprising cargo—crates of books—joined the flood of troop reinforcements, weapons and...
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