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We all know how I feel about suburbia. How would you redesign the suburbs?

The question is the subject of a contest from Dwell magazine and Inhabitat. I’m pretty curious how Snarketeers would answer this question.

If you want people to know what awesomely supercool books you are reading, you can use the internet to tell them.

Ezra Klein, “Can the Internet Be Your New Bookshelf?”:

This is one of those spots where I imagine social networking really will save us. Back when I was using Facebook more, I was a big fan of Visual Bookshelf, which let you display what you were reading and, when you finished, let you rate and review the books. As a matter of signaling, it’s quite a bit more efficient. Your friends don’t have to catch you in a literary moment on the Metro. And being able to browse the collections of all my friends was a delight, and offered occasional surprises that helped me known them better: former football teammates who were now reading John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, and libertarian friends who listed “The Grapes of Wrath” as one of their favorite books of all time.

I also found that displaying the contents of my bedside table helped counteract my tendency to get distracted 90 pages in and start something else. Now that the books were hanging out on my profile, I felt more pressure to finish them. Somehow, simply leaving books around my room didn’t carry the same silent reproach. In fact, I sort of miss that pressure. Which is why I’ve added a little Amazon widget that does much the same thing to the right sidebar. Technology!

James Wolcott laments the loss of personalized conspicuous consumption that goes with putting down a paperback and picking up a Kindle:

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it

Virginia Heffernan says that internet romances “are not romances between people at all. They

Britta Gustafson, “Learning to see wooden poles“:

When I

I had never heard of this disorder before:

In hyperlexia, a child spontaneously and precociously masters single-word reading. It can be viewed as a superability, that is, word recognition ability far above expected levels… Hyperlexic children are often fascinated by letters and numbers. They are extremely good at decoding language and thus often become very early readers. Some hyperlexic children learn to spell long words (such as elephant) before they are two and learn to read whole sentences before they turn three. An fMRI study of a single child showed that hyperlexia may be the neurological opposite of dyslexia.[2]

Often, hyperlexic children will have a precocious ability to read but will learn to speak only by rote and heavy repetition, and may also have difficulty learning the rules of language from examples or from trial and error, which may result in social problems… Their language may develop using echolalia, often repeating words and sentences. Often, the child has a large vocabulary and can identify many objects and pictures, but cannot put their language skills to good use. Spontaneous language is lacking and their pragmatic speech is delayed. Hyperlexic children often struggle with Who? What? Where? Why? and How? questions… Social skills often lag tremendously. Hyperlexic children often have far less interest in playing with other children than do their peers.

The thing is, this absolutely and precisely describes me in childhood, especially before the age of 5 or 6. (This is also the typical age when hyperlexic children begin to learn how to interact with others.) It also describes my son – which is how my wife found the description and forwarded it to me.

You walk around your entire life with these stories, these tics, and the entire time, your quirks are really symptoms. It’s a little strange.

So I’m sitting here, working on making a plain-vanilla hypertext version of New Liberal Arts so folks can read it on their phones, Kindles, whatever, and cleaning up all the extra cruft to make it work — you can just cut-and-paste from the PDF, it’ll be easy, Robin says, forgetting that it’s set in opposing faces that sometimes get out of order, that the all-cap fonts turn into gibberish, and that there’s a freaking secret message in the thing —

And, maybe just naturally, or maybe as a function of what I’m doing, I am totally blown away – again – by Diana Kimball’s “Coding and Decoding” and Rachel Leow’s “Translation.”

Seriously. Just check them out. They’re so elegant and complimentary – Rachel’s is about a kind of patient mastery and deep connection to other human beings past and present, Diana’s about ambient awareness of linguistic symbols that we discover but whose deciphering is always going to be incomplete. Originally, I was going to write a separate NLA entry for “Languages” – when I first read these two, months ago, I realized that I had nothing I wanted to add.

I don’t have a lot of criteria for friendship, but the one characteristic I think is invariant is a love of and care for language. If you don’t take pleasure or find intellectual satisfaction in how words are strung together – maybe even especially written words – then you and I are quickly going to run out of things to say to or do with each other.

So that said, I think a good index of both your wordnerdery and the likelihood of the two of us becoming and remaining fast friends is your excitement in reading about the new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which will be published – in two glorious volumes! – this fall:

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is the culmination of 44 years of painstaking work by scholars at the University of Glasgow.

It not only groups words with similar meanings but does so in chronological order according to their history – with the oldest first and most recent last. According to its publisher, the OED, it’s the largest thesaurus in the world and the first historical thesaurus in any language.

With 800,000 meanings, 600,000 words and more than 230,000 categories and sub categories, it’s twice as big as Roget’s version.

And if that doesn’t have him turning in his grave, it also contains almost every word in English from Old English to the present day, or 2003 to be precise – the cut-off date for the new dictionary.

Selected early reviews of New Liberal Arts:

Kevin Kelly, “Innovative Publishing Model“:

It really doesn’t matter what’s in the book. The model is brilliant, if you have an audience. The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible… As it happens, the PDF reveals that the content is pretty thin. But it did not have to be. Their premise is great (the new literacies), and their biz model innovative. We can hope they try again. I am impressed enough with the experiment to use this model on my next self-published book.

The readers at Book Cover Archive: “This may be the only use of Century Gothic I’ll ever appreciate,” “friggin sold out! love that quarter binding…”

Court Merrigan, “Tiny Snarkmarket

And now for a note on the dark side of printed books: Michael Jensen, Director of Strategic Web Communications for National Academies and National Academies Press, collects and analyzes data about global warming and ecological collapse. At the AAUP meeting in Philadelphia, he presented “Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity,” an argument that the combination of financial and environmental necessity compels university presses to move away from printing, shipping, and storing books and towards a digital-driven, open-access model, with print-on-demand and institutional support rounding out the new revenue model.

(I’m posting Part 2 of Jensen’s speech – the part that’s mostly about publishing – here. Watch Part 1 – which is mostly about the environment – if you want to be justly terrified about what’s going to happen to human beings and everything else pretty soon.)

This is one reason I’m kind of happy that we didn’t print a thousand or more copies of New Liberal Arts. We can make print rare, we can get copies straight to readers, we can make print more responsible, but mostly we have to make print count. And – of course – share the information with as many people as possible.