Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

I recently started following Maria Popova who tweets some amazing and interesting links as @brainpicker.

This year’s RRJ is mostly online and as usual there’s some great pieces in there. Read it on their site or pick it up at your local indie mag seller.

Finally, Adam Schwabe points to a great piece from writer and philosopher Alain de Botton of a world without airplanes.

From the piece:

In a future world without aeroplanes, children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies and fly high over the Himalayas and the Tasman Sea.

The wise elders would explain that inside the aircraft, passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship – and would complain that the food in miniature plastic beakers before them was not quite as tasty as the sort they could prepare in their own kitchens.

Photo of Washington International Airport 1941 from the Life Archive.

All this talk of e-books has me thinking about the possible decline of the bookshelf.

Russell Smith a few weeks back wrote about this very topic:

Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation. I can probably find the complete text of most of them online within an hour. It’s the same for CDs: If you have the time to copy them all, you can throw them all away and buy music online for the rest of your life. In the future, we will live in ever-smaller houses with ever-larger TV screens, so you need all the wall-space you have. And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase.

But of course, the bookshelf isn’t dead yet and there are still some stunning examples of bookshelf as art/decor/inspiration out there.

Design Sponge points us to artist Jane Mount’s gorgeous series of illustrations of people’s ideal bookshelves.

The one below speaks to me current fascination with whales and also has a bunch of books I quite love.

I’m also very fond of this one and

Of course, like Smith argues in his column, what we choose to display (and how we do it) can reveal a lot about ourselves. The New Yorker’s great books blog, the Book Bench, has a regular feature that psychoanalyzes people through their shelves.

Frankly, all this talk of the death of the bookshelf might be a bit premature. If Apartment Therapy can devote countless blog posts to the devilish problem of showing off all your books and refer to them as “the original modular furniture” (how trendy, how moderne) then I think we’ll be stuck with cheap Billy bookcases for a bit longer.

Clay Shirky has another great essay out that I’m still taking time to digest. It argues that radical change causes complex systems to collapse because they’re unable to change. Not because they don’t want to but because their complexity causes them to lock up.

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

Mathew Ingram also sums it up on Gigaom.

Poet Edward Carson argues that our familiarity with the internet is changing the shape of non-fiction.

David Sasaki, over at the PBS Idealab looks at why curation is becoming more important in today’s news environment.

Finally, some eye candy: A gallery of Penguin covers sorted by decade.

This edition of the digest is going to be sillier than usual… but it IS Monday, so that’s ok? Right?

Spring, and love is in the air. But beware these first date faux pas young lovers. BEWARE.

Dork vs. nerd vs. dweeb finally explained using a Venn diagram.

Twitter and dating advice from @jeremywright.

An adorable gal recites pi to the 100th digit, solves Rubik’s cube while balancing books on her head. Wonder what she’s like on a first date?

It’s going to take me a few weeks to go through all of this but there’s a glut of stuff about the future of journalism right now.

Nieman lab has an extensive roundup of journalism/media related things from the SXSWi conference

I will probably be sitting around for the next two or three days trying to grok the Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, Tristan Harris talk on context and news.

Over in the U.K. we’ve got journalism pointyheads at the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit.

I’m going to highlight this panel discussion with Wikipedia’s Jim Wales, Newser’s Michael Wolff and the BBC’s Erik Huggers.

Finally, if you haven’t read it yet, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism released its State of the News Media report.

The two-penny summary? Ads are down, readers are a fickle, fickle bunch but hey, people are innovating…

Craig Mod’s essay “Books in the Age of the iPad” is probably the best thing I’ve read about the future of the book in a little while. Very well thought out and lots to digest. Hint, magazine and newspaper folks, it’s relevant to you too.

Excerpt:

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.

Russell Smith laments for the bookshelf, and frankly if people’s libraries were to start shrinking I would too.

The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog asks a bunch of people what they’re reading.

Finally if you want to mix-up your March Madness with a little bit of literature… BAM! This year’s The Morning News Tournament of Books is on. I’ve got my giant foam hand in the air for Let The Great World Spin.

Pals Jesse Brown and Ian Daffern put together this great video on why the newspaper deserves saving… or doesn’t. Be sure to check out Jesse’s great show Search Engine.

What do Facebook, Wal Mart and Apple have in common? Other than the fact they’re worth oodles of cash? Fast Company considers them some of the most innovative companies out there. Lots of good reading here from FC.

Robot bartenders! The future is here! If you don’t tip him he’ll shoot you with a laser.

Finally, birds and guitars. Thanks @helenspitzer for the video.

Lovable celebrity chef Jamie Oliver takes the stage at TED and talks about why Americans (and most of the developed world) are eating themselves to death.

Here’s the video:

and a summary of talking points if you’re too lazy to watch it.

Boing Boing found this great quote about journalism. Guess when it’s from:

“America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence, [...] the frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition.”

An interesting article that ponders if the iPad could actually cannibalize the remaining print readers of newspapers instead of spurring new ones.

ACL points us to a great vintage vid of some Ivy League winter carnival thing. Sorry, no Bonhomme.

Dartmouth Winter Carnival from Michael Williams on Vimeo.

The Sunday Best has a great guide about Vancouver. Useful for those of you who are brave enough to visit during the Olympics but also good reading for those planning to visit (and heck even locals too). Also, check out that Maira Kalmanish banner on Thom’s site.

Want, want, want! Postcards of Penguin covers. A better look at them here.

There was a huge sporting event last night. Yep, the Puppy Bowl. Peyton and Drew have got nothing on this.

Whales are awesome. Duh! Here’s a book that tells you why.

Photo from the Flickr Commons

The BBC airs a documentary series which looks at stuff…

From Fast Company:

What makes us human? It’s our stuff.

A truly incredible radio series from the BBC traces the history of human civilization through 100 objects from the British Museum. It kicked off last week with an Egyptian mummyfrom the third century BC (the series apparently isn’t purely chronological–object number 2 was a 1.8-million-year-old carved stone chopping tool). The show runs through September, ending with modern marvels like the credit card, Soviet propaganda, and Hokusai’s famous Wave. Object 100 is still a secret though–any guesses?

Esquire’s Charles Pierce has good things to say about the State of the Union.

TMN’s Robert Birnbaum looks at a new anthology of European fiction edited by personal favourite Aleksandar Hemon.

Finally, because those nights are still cold… the Amateur Gourmet’s Soup Battle of 2010. FYI Vesalka’s Cabbage Soup is hella delicious.