Tim Carmody on the Past, Present and Future of Reading

Tim Carmody at TOC 2012: Digital reading is firmly part of the mainstream. Whether it’s on the web, in an app, or packaged as an e-book, more readers all over the world are starting with a screen. But mainstream audience and still-quickly evolving standards are a recipe for anxiety for readers and publishers alike. This keynote examines how readers’ experiences and expectations are changing in response to the new digital reading landscape, and how and why editors and publishers can address those expectations and soothe those anxieties. 

(via Explore)​

Trust your hunches, and write them down.

The problem with hunches is that it's incredibly easy to forget them, precisely because they're not fully-baked ideas. You're reading an article, and a little spark of an idea pops into your head, but by the time you've finished the article, you're checking your email, or responding to some urgent request from your colleague, and the next thing you know, you've forgotten the hunch for good. And even the ones that you do manage to retain often don't turn out to be useful to you for months or years, which gives you countless opportunities to lose track of them.

This is why for the past eight years or so I've been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There's no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy--just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I've managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.

Steven Johnson, writer of the must-read Where Ideas Come From, explores writing and idea generation in the newly launched in beta Medium. ​

A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical

The sad truth about the book world is that it doesn’t need more yes-saying novelists and certainly no more yes-saying critics. We are drowning in them. What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics — perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.

Dwight Garner writing for The New York Times explores the lost art of literary criticism in a world ruled by archetypes like the mean critic (think Simon Cowell) and the vapid critic (think Paula Adbul.)

Pulitzer & Tony Winner Doug Wright on Objects, Evidence and Writing What You Don't Know

Doug Wright, Pulitzer- and Tony-Award-winning playwright - "I Am My Own Wife," "Quills," "Grey Gardens," & "Hands on a Hardbody" - on The Paul Holdengraber Show.

Notes Towards a Philosophy of Sleep

For sleep is rather extraordinary. If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way. If I also claimed that the condition was infectious, you would wish me luck in coping with such a terrible disease, and bid me a hasty farewell.

Of course, sleep is not a disease at all, but the condition of daily (nightly) life for the vast majority of us. The fact that we accept without surprise the need for a prolonged black-out as part of our daily life highlights our tendency to take for granted anything about our condition that is universal. We don’t see how strange sleep is because (nearly) everyone sleeps. Indeed, the situation of those who do not suffer from Tallis’s Daily Hallucinating Delusional Syndrome is awful. They have something that truly deserves our sympathy: chronic insomnia.

Since all animals sleep, we assume it has a biological purpose. The trouble is, we don’t know what that purpose is. There are many theories – energy conservation, growth promotion, immobilisation during hours of darkness when it might be dangerous to be out and about, consolidation of memories – but they are all open to serious objections. William Dement, one of the leading researchers of the last century and co-discoverer of Rapid Eye Movement sleep, concluded from his fifty years in the forefront of the field that “the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid, is that we get sleepy.”

Raymond Tallis tackles an exhortation by Christopher Hamilton ​for philosophers to spend more time exploring the phenomenon of sleep.