Pew Internet & American Life Project

Pew Internet & American Life Project

For teens, Internet is fact of life
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Martha Irvine
Associated Press

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

UC Berkeley Summer Reading List

UC Berkeley Summer Reading List

California Trip

Click here for photos from our California trip

"You Shall Know Our Velocity" by Dave Eggers

Salon.com Book Review "You Shall Know Our Velocity" by Dave Eggers

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass at 150

'Leaves of Grass' at 150: As Exuberant and Encompassing as Ever
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
NYTimes July 3, 2005
Walt Whitman Notebooks at the U.S. Library of Congress

David Orr - What Is Education For?

David Orr - What Is Education For?
The Meadowcreek Project
AJLC Home
So That All the Other Struggles May Go On - David Orr

USDA Forest Fire Maps

USDA Forest Service Wildfire Maps

Moleskins and 3X5s

"Obviously the work of Hemingway and Picasso had about as much do with their Moleskines as it did with their khakis (which both men wore, according to that Gap campaign). Yet the Moleskine just looks like a thing that holds interesting, and possibly important, jottings and sketches. Even if you're carrying it to another boring staff meeting to take notes about sales projections, the notebook makes for a fantastic emblem of creative possibility. Of course, people who actually write for a living sometimes have a different relationship to blank pages. One quotation that probably won't be used to sell Moleskines is John McPhee's 1996 sardonic remark in the journal Creative Nonfiction: ''Anything beats writing.'' Maybe he wouldn't have felt that way if he'd had a cooler notebook."
Look Smart
by Rob Walker
NYTimes Magazine
6.26.05

And then there's the trusty filecard PDA. Guess I'm not the only one out here using the ever-reliable 3X5. Check out these related analog sites - A Million Monkeys Typing and Journalisimo.com.

'How to Be Idle': Being and Do-Nothingness

'How to Be Idle': Being and Do-Nothingness
By Tom Hodgkinson, reviewed by Jeffrey Steingarten
NYTimes Book Review June 26, 2005

What do idlers do while they idle? A provisional list can be found in these pages. Idlers contemplate, meditate, appreciate, imagine, feel a sense of peace and calm, follow their dreams, go fishing (Izaak Walton is the star of the 7 p.m. chapter), smoke tobacco, stare at the ceiling and gaze at the stars. . . . They may work for themselves or engage in meditative tasks like chopping vegetables for dinner -- but they do not work at jobs. Jobs are a relatively recent invention, a creation of the Industrial Revolution, Hodgkinson writes, relying on E. P. Thompson's pioneering work, ''The Making of the English Working Class'' (1963), and Bertrand Russell's essay ''In Praise of Idleness'' (1932). (If you check it out in the O.E.D., you'll find that things are somewhat more ambiguous. Before the 1920's, the word ''job'' generally meant a small, discrete piece of work, what jazz musicians would call a gig.

Which reminds me of the book Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs. Written after the fashion of Studs Terkle's Working, Gig is a contemporary compendium of interviews with working people about their "jobs" and work. Here's a list of job titles included in Gig.

Salon review of Gig