I do a lot of reading during my commute, using my iTouch and Instapaper. It’s a great way to “clip” an article or text to read offline. I’m also loving the stories I find through Longreads, which highlights the best long form stories on the web.
A few stories which I’ve found interesting:
Sing for Your Life, NY Times: A feature on the Metropolitan Opera Council auditions.
A High-Tech Library Keeps Books at Faculty Fingertips—With Robot Help (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
“At the University of Chicago’s new library, 70 students have summer jobs filling a chilly subterranean bunker 50 feet beneath the main reading room. Their mission: Load a million volumes into a machine-dominated warehouse that most library patrons will never see.”
Dirty Business: Raj Rajaratnam, Preet Bharara and the Galleon Trial, The New Yorker
What Big Media Can Learn from the New York Public Library, The Atlantic.
“The library isn’t floundering. Rather, it’s flourishing, putting out some of the most innovative online projects in the country. On the stuff you can measure — library visitors, website visitors, digital gallery images viewed — the numbers are up across the board compared with five years ago. On the stuff you can’t, like conceptual leadership, the NYPL is killing it.”
Baffled at a Bookcase (London Review of Books)
“I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled. He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground to be covered. ‘All these books. I’ll never catch up,’ wails the young Joe Orton in the film script of Prick Up Your Ears, and in The Old Country another young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in.”
Privacy and social media investigation: how I tracked down an entire family from one tweet (Joanna Geary)
“Last Saturday I presented to students taking part in the brilliant Young Journalist Academy…The topic was “New Media” (not my title) and the primary aim was to get them up and running with their own blog and learn to publish online…However, I also knew it would be the perfect opportunity to gauge just how aware a group of bright, 16 and 17-year-olds were on the issues of web privacy and of just how easy it is to track down information about people online.”