Happy New Year to all readers of this blog.

I thought a top ten of the past year would be ...   more »

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, of which I'm a big fan, isn't strictly about economics. But not only does it ...   more »

I've posted before about the Google Books Settlement (and my reasons for opting out). For those who find the legal ...   more »

It's the time of year when the newspapers are full of year in retrospect and year ahead features, and there ...   more »

Through the mailbox today, a great Christmas present courtesy of the publicity department at Yale University Press - Joel Mokyr's ...   more »

In one of this blog's forays into the economics of publishing (rather than the publishing of economics), I spoke to ...   more »

Robert Darnton, one of the most thoughtful commentators on the Google books deal, has written about the latest developments in ...   more »

My favourite technology correspondent* has brought to my attention a great article on Techcrunch on what e-books are doing ...   more »

Steven Medema's history of the idea of self-interest in economics, The Hesitant Hand, starts with the Ancient Greeks and ...   more »

I recently commented on  Educating Economists, edited by David Colander and KimMarie McGoldrick, a volume of interesting essays on ...   more »

News of the death of Paul Samuelson, at 94, sent me to my bookshelves. There's a beaten-up copy of Foundations ...   more »

A surprisingly high proportion of economists like to relax with either detective fiction or science fiction. I believe it has ...   more »

One of the essential interests of an educated economist, the subject of my previous post, is economic history. This used ...   more »

What kind of education do economists need? I've always felt privileged by mine: PPE at Oxford, an inter-disciplinary course with ...   more »

There are several reviews of interest in today's UK papers. The FT's marvelous Gillian Tett reviews John Cassidy's How Markets ...   more »

The revised edition of The Soulful Science is out very soon and available now for preorder on Amazon UK or ...   more »

This morning I happened upon an interesting article in the Chronicle Review about computer scientist (and much more besides) David Gelernter. The article is about his new book, Judaism: A Way of Being, but mainly about the impact his serious injuries at the hands of a parcel bomb from the Unabomber transformed his way of thinking and being.

It reminded me that Gelernter's 1998 book, Machine Beauty, is one of my all-time favourites about the culture of computing. Thinking about this book from the perspective of a world transformed by Apple's design aesthetic and capability, it looks rather far-sighted (although actually the book is somewhat critical of Apple). His formula for beauty is power+simplicity, so there's more than a whiff of high modernism in his personal machine aesthetic. Gelernter has his passions about different bits of technology and they differ from mine. But what I really like about Machine Beauty is that it gets away from the tech-mania of many geeks, and places the machines in the realm of the human.

This theme emerges in the Chronicle Review article as well. Author Evan Goldstein writes:

Two years after the bombing, Theodore J. Kaczynski, who would shortly be identified as the Unabomber, sent Gelernter a letter: "People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are," he wrote. "If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world." Gelernter himself, in fact, has always been profoundly ambivalent about technology. "Because David has a concern for the whole of human life, he doesn't fall for the view that technology can provide answers to our deepest needs and aspirations," says Kass. Gelernter's byline routinely appears over articles that include statements like: "American schools would do better if they junked their Macs and PC's and let students fool around somewhere else. Schools should be telling students to reads books, not play with computers."