Gutenberg In The Whirlwind

1.

Back in the days when I was doing a lot of speechifying at conferences and writing the occasional column for one or another professional journal, I would often talk about our “Gutenberg moment”. 

Somewhere around 1447, Gutenberg (and others) construct a printing press with reusable movable type.  Not a singular invention de novo, it's the clever combining of existing innovations.  The press borrowed from the vintners, beautiful permanent rag paper, precision metal casting with just the right degree of durability, inks that would adhere in a thin film to the type and resist bleeding into the paper, a rising commercial sector with mercantile fairs and trade routes crossing the continent. 

Surely there was money to be made.  All over Europe, entrepreneurs leap in, setting up print shops, intent on making their fortunes.  The demand for luxury goods is high among the nobility, the upper clergy, the richest among the merchant classes.  But the traditionalists frown on the notion of printed missals and religious tracts.  They hear rumors of a 42 line Bible.  Duplicated!  Multiple copies scribed by a machine!  Which borders on sacrilege!  Does it not, Father?  Their sons, however, building their own fortunes, find the printed works to be worthy markers of attainment, particularly when they can hire the finest illuminators to ink in the Initial Cap.

Most of the printers quickly go bust.  Some clever few survive.  Turns out there wasn’t enough of a market for those luxury items.  The successful printers turned to indulgences, playing cards, and, of course, pornography.  Demand ramps up so much that there’s a paper shortage near the end of the century.  A printer in the Netherlands shifts all their books from quarto to octavo, multiplying their supply.  And, oh, these smaller books fit neatly into a saddlebag.  Portable.

From quirky, ridiculously expensive luxury items that most people couldn’t see much of a use for, and that many knowledgeable people saw as a diabolic danger, to objects desired and affordable by the middle class. 

2.

Our Gutenberg moment is undoubtedly December of 1994, when Netscape launched.  Again, it’s the combining of technologies – digital networks, home computing, the world wide web, graphic design, global free trade making it possible for millions of people to interact with each other online.  And with precious few rules about how to behave.

According to my own poorly organized records, I started using the Gutenberg analogy in the fall of 2004.  Two years later I’m sitting in the bar at the Arabella Grand in Frankfurt-am-Main where I’d just given an address to the STM Association about the future roles of librarians in this strange new digital world.  I’m bouncing my analogy off the guy standing next to me, guy I’d just met, and he excitedly opens his laptop to show me an elegant slide deck that uses just four timeline images to make the same point.¹

Printed books during the second half of the 15^th century are referred to as “incunabula”. They’re the first tentative steps into the world of print.  What Bilder’s deck illuminated is that it took much longer than those first fifty years for a mature print culture to develop.  Look at everything that had to happen:  Supply chains and book fairs to mass produce, market, and distribute these newfangled objects.  Publishing as a trade, and editing as a profession, had to be invented.  The notion of “intellectual property” had to be formulated, along with the laws of copyright, trademark, and patents to govern it.  Education reshaped, universities reinvented.  It’s 200 years before the first scientific journals are created, teeing up the Age of Enlightenment.  The technology’s just the beginning.  Societies had to develop the rules, legal and cultural and economic that could harness the technology – all while the technology reshaped every aspect of the culture.  It took generations.  We’re in the thick of it again.

3.

The impact of printing cannot be overstated.  It’s the most fundamental shift since that from orality to literacy.  Walter Ong described that earlier transformation, how it reshaped the use that humans made of memory, how it encoded our stories about our origins and our hopes and dreams into a form that could outlast the memories of the bards and mystics who’d been the keepers of culture.  Once people began to write things down they could develop abstract thinking.  Philosophy replaced myth.  Law replaced tradition.  Counting begets mathematics begets engineering begets architecture begets fantastical weapons of war.

With printing, literacy expands to the masses.  The gatekeepers, the clerics and kings who make the rules, lose control.  In 1997, Stewart & Cohen coined the term “extelligence” to refer to the accumulation of recorded cultural capital. Encoded primarily in books and other paper documents, more recently in technologies for sound and video recording, this cultural knowledge, existing outside any individual human mind, but exerting a tremendous influence over what those individuals can and do think, reached critical mass with the invention of printing.  In their 1999 collaboration with Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld, they use this concept to mark the singular advance in human evolution that the print world made both possible and inevitable.²

It's too bad their word “extelligence” didn’t take hold because it’s a nifty way of referring to all of that cultural “stuff” and the impact it has on the way people operate, but no matter.  The key insight is that authority now resides in the documents themselves, no longer just in the gatekeepers who controlled access to those written records in the centuries before print. 

4.

This new world required great libraries, tools for organizing knowledge, achieved by organizing the books in which such knowledge resided.  Libraries were the temples of the extelligence and to systematically access it – or the librarians who knew how to wend their way through it – you had to go there.  Librarians have the reputation for knowing lots of stuff.  We have no interest in disabusing people of that notion, but it’s not as true as it seems, despite the fact that most of us have a ridiculous amount of clutter spilling haphazardly out of the storage cabinets in our brains.  But our superpower comes from understanding how information is structured into knowledge.  We are wizards at using the tools invented over the centuries to keep track of it all.  We have mental maps of the extelligence and the skillset to interrogate it quickly, dig out bits of information and give them context in ways that look like magic to mere civilians.

How radically this is no longer true!  Despite the hype, only a portion of humanity’s recorded knowledge has been digitized.  But to a degree that increases daily it can be entered easily with that blisteringly powerful computer that looks like it’s about to slip out of the butt pocket of the giggling fifteen year old kid bouncing down the street in front of you.  Good thing she’s got a decent case for it.

Finding information isn’t the issue any longer.  We’re trying to cope with Nick Carr’s haystack full of needles.³  Sifting, assessing, deciding what’s true, what’s useful, what’s missing.  Staying out of the rabbit holes that open with every click.  Zeroing in.  Staying focused.  The skills we’ve developed for managing in the print world are less and less helpful the further the structure of the online world diverges from the world we know.  That ubiquity demands that our brains gradually reshape how they operate so that we can make good use of it for all of the things humans have made use of knowledge for in the past – you know, improving our standards of living while crushing our enemies.

5.

In Ruth Ozeki’s magnificent novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, the climactic scene takes our hero, Benny, into the depths of The Library, into The Bindery.  It’s here that the Unbound speak and as their voices rise around him, it’s as if all the recorded knowledge in the world is clamoring his way at once and it blows his mind.  Ozeki’s brilliant conceit is that we humans need to bind the Unbound in order to withstand and tame their power.  It’s only once we’ve formed the Unbound into Books that we can arrange them, organize them, measure them against each other and against ourselves.  Without that structure we would be overwhelmed.

The stuff of the internet is unbound. 

6.

In a recent essay, Freddie DeBoer endorses the view that we’ve been in a stagnant period for some time now, at least as far as technological innovation goes.  He leans on Robert J. Gordon’s 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth:

Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

Paul Krugman reviewed the book for the New York Times and offers this:

Urban life in America on the eve of World War II was already recognizably modern; you or I could walk into a 1940s apartment, with its indoor plumbing, gas range, electric lights, refrigerator and telephone, and we’d find it basically functional. We’d be annoyed at the lack of television and Internet — but not horrified or disgusted.

He contrasts that with the reaction of “urban Americans from 1940 walking into 1870-style accommodations — which they could still do in the rural South — were indeed horrified and disgusted.”  But our generation, Krugman’s and mine, is still tethered to the pre-internet world we grew up in.  If  Josie and her Zed cohort were to go into a 1940s apartment they would certainly not find it “basically functional”.  Maybe Krugman would only be annoyed by the lack of internet – Josie would be horrified.  The internet isn’t an add-on for her, it’s where she lives.  To be fair, Krugman wrote his review in 2016 and much has happened since then – the pandemic, for one, which has had tremendous impacts on how people organize their work days.  Traditional print media has been eviscerated, while many of the new upstarts that threatened them have crashed and burned in turn.  The volume of stuff being churned out, the number of voices competing for space, grows and grows and grows.

What you use for a yardstick matters, of course.  Gordon’s book is primarily an economic argument. But surely there are other metrics than GDP to examine the “consequences for how we live”.

7a.

In 1992, Kathi Goldmark’s day job was shepherding authors on their book tours, but she was a rock and roll animal at heart.  She thought it’d be cool to get a bunch of the authors she’d worked with to form a band and do a benefit at the big annual American Booksellers Association convention.  But how to get it organized?  The dozen or so people she wanted to rope in... er, invite, were scattered all across the US.  Managing a conference call for that many people would’ve been prohibitively expensive.  They did it with group fax, supplemented by what we now call snailmail for those without easy access to a fax machine.  Kathi had everybody’s contact info, so if, say, Stephen King wanted to make suggestions for the setlist, he’d send a fax to Kathi, who would resend it to the group.⁴ And so on.  Now think about how that affects decision making, the way you formulate a question, the way you respond, the way you expect others to respond.  Everything is slower, there aren’t any off the cuff decisions, you have to take time to think through how to explain what you’d like the group to do. 

Contrast this with the rapidfire of a comment thread in social media.  How it’s now a radical gesture of generosity to append a tagline to your emails allowing people to wait a day to reply.  We fumble stumble through our Zoom calls, trying to make the technology replicate what it’d be like to have everybody in the same room.  It’s not close to satisfactory, but we haven’t yet learned how to do it better.  We’re still stuck, trying to get the new technology to behave like the things we know.

7b.

March, 1960.  The interviewer has just asked Coltrane which tenor players he most admires.  After praising Sonny Rollins, Coltrane continues:

“Of course, in the formative days, years ago, there was Dexter Gordon...”

“You do have a strong feeling for tradition, haven’t you?”

“I guess so.  I mean, I would like to even make it stronger, you know; I’d like to strengthen my roots, so to say...  Because I didn’t start at the beginning and there’s a whole lot back there that all young musicians should know...”

“So privately, when you’re listening, do you go back there just on your own account, and listen?”

“Well, I don’t have many records in that era now, but I do plan to get ‘em.”

Ten years later, 15 year old me is scouring the record bins, looking for something I’m willing to spend my precious $5.98 on.  I’m a little bit more adventurous in my listening than some of my peers, but even so I don’t go too far afield from the music I already know.  It’ll be weeks before I can afford another album.  There is so much music that I have no way to know.

These days, I use Apple Play.  Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert has a prominent role in Ozeki’s novel, so I pull that one up for a listen.  I’m intrigued by what I read about boygenius so I put their album on repeat, loving it more each time.  I was on a Zappa kick at the beginning of the year.  Josie recommends Noah Kahan and Zack Bryan.  Sometimes I need the soaring opening of Sibelius’s 5^th Symphony — there are several versions to try.  Not that impressed with Usher’s new album, but I might give it another shot.  Last week there was Bizet’s Carmen, an Ellington trio album I’d never heard, Glazunov, Prokofiev, Leadbelly, Professor Longhair.  I see Imelda May’s sultry glide across the stage at the Jeff Beck tribute before she launches into “Remember”.  Who is that!  I grab her album, 11 After the Hour. 

I’m still old school, the habits of album listening impossible to break.  And why is it that artists are still producing albums anyway, when most of the revenue is now coming through streams of individual tracks?  Because culture and commerce are still trying to catch up.

One hundred and fifty years ago, all music was live.  All instruments were acoustic.  You made it yourself, or with friends & family.  Your town might have had an opera house or a recital hall and touring musicians might come through.  But when you were making music or listening to music, that was the only thing you were doing.  Music wasn’t an accompaniment, a soundtrack to your life.  Coltrane could at least seek out the records of the people he wanted to learn from.  In 1790, if you’d heard about Haydn and wanted to experience it, you needed to find a performance, which required somebody obtaining the score and the skill to play it and the musicians to play it with and the venue to play it in.  My $5.98 album would’ve been an incomprehensible marvel.  And certainly there would’ve been many devotees who’d’ve been horrified at how recording music must destroy its very essence.

The music press is replete with doom and gloom over the collapse of the music industry.  Read enough of these articles and you could be convinced that musical creativity must be drying up and soon there’ll be no new music being created at all!  But the music industry as we’ve known it is not the be all and end all of music creativity.  It takes very little exploration to see that the wealth of new music being produced is richer than ever.  A kid with a bit of an ear and some curiosity now has more than a century of music instantly available.  Is it tough to make a living as a musician?  Of course.  The gatekeepers have always been skilled at making sure most of the revenue falls in their laps (just ask Haydn).  But there are more opportunities to bypass the gatekeepers now.  The O’Connell kids made their first records in Finneas’s bedroom.  No wonder the people who are dependent on the “industry” are freaking out.  But how wonderful for the creative energies of musicians who find the gate-keeping and genre rigidification stupidly archaic.  Country music fans rise up aghast at Beyoncé’s intrusion into their corral.  She laughs and goes to number one.

And has this tsunami of recorded music destroyed live performance?  Hah!  From small clubs to living room concerts to refurbished and revitalized vaudeville theaters to the rock and roll catharsis of a Springsteen show to the global phenomenon that is Taylor Swift on tour, the desire to participate in the energy exchange that is live music is more powerful than ever.  Dozens, hundreds, even thousands, singing along, musician and audience lifting each other up.

The music industry, the news industry, the publishing industry, the education industry – all the industries that have been developed to economically manage intellectual property are coming apart at the seams.  But musicians keep making music, writers keep writing, teachers keep teaching, people keep learning.

7c.

The inventor of the Essay, Michel de Montaigne, had a library of about 1,000 books.  Remarkable for a private library in the middle of the sixteenth century.  He went back to the same books again and again, adding to his underlining and marginalia, teasing out new and deeper meanings from Plutarch or Lucretius, weaving them into his own attempts to explicate the movement of his mind.  Acquiring books was a difficult and expensive process.  You can imagine him echoing Coltrane’s quest to find more records from those who came before, the people he’s trying to learn from.

Four hundred years later Didion, McPhee, Wolfe, Ozick, Angelou are reshaping the essay in the middle of the American Century.  So much has happened since Montaigne’s time!  There are so many more books to build on.  But the difference remains one of degree, not of kind.  Read.  Make notes.  Try out some sentences.  Try out some others.  Learn about another book you realize you need.  Figure out how to get a copy.  Make more notes.  Draft more sentences.  Set the draft aside.  Look at it three weeks later and decide it’s garbage.  Try again.  Eventually, through a combination of luck, talent, bull-headedness, and drive, get a piece published in a journal with a circulation of 10,000 and hope that you get a response from someone.  Repeat.

But today, when I decided to mention Montaigne’s library, and I wanted to refresh my memory on the details, I didn’t go to a book (although I have several that would’ve served the purpose).  I didn’t need to drive to the library to consult a book I didn’t own.  I didn’t even need to call a sharp librarian to look something up for me.  I put “Montaigne’s library” into my search engine and instantaneously had the fact I was looking for (a thousand books), along with a wonderful blog post by someone who’d recently visited Montaigne’s Tower (where he kept his library) as well as a link to the digital facsimiles of those very books in the University of Cambridge Digital Library.  Finding the fact was simple.  The challenge is to keep from being buried under another haystack made of fascinating needles.

Back again to Ozeki’s novel, where The Book somewhat pompously maintains that it is books that give birth to more books.  The human “author” is merely the amanuensis, the scribe, the midwife.  Montaigne’s Essais had a thousand parents. By the 1960s books’ parents were in the millions.  But in the unbound of the whirlwind they are without number.

8.

Imagine Josie’s world as she sits at the table with Lynn and me and Sadie (I’m thinking of that steak joint in Oxford).  There are the three of us physically present and there are those others, who, if we could see them, might be ghostly shimmering forms also at the table.⁵  They are as real and present to her as we are and when she picks up her phone to ask a question or respond to something it is little different to her than if she’d just turned aside to say something to the other person sitting next to her.  She’s not using the phone to leave our conversation; she’s using it to bring others in.

Or think of those (thankfully rare) occasions when she texts us because her Mom’s not responding to something she’s just asked.  Her expectation is that her Mom is always there.  Fifteen years ago Lynn and I had dinner in Boston with my niece Jessica during Jess’s first semester at MIT.  She off-handedly mentioned that she talked to her Mom and Dad pretty much every day.  I was floored.  When I was in my last two years of high school, boarding during the week, I said goodbye when they dropped me off on Sunday evening, hello when they picked me up the following Friday.  Unless there was an emergency that justified a long distance call, that was it.  Jess had a daily contact.  Josie’s contact is constant and seamless.  This shift is not just a matter of degree.

I imagine her living in a whirlwind.  Remember the tornado scene from the Wizard of Oz?  How Dorothy is taken up into the funnel cloud and watches as fragments of normal life twirl around with her?  Trees, a henhouse, a little old lady knitting in her rocking chair giving Dorothy a wave, the cow, the rowboat, the evil Almira Gulch transforming into the Wicked Witch.  But for Josie there’s no final thump, no burst of technicolor outside.  She’s walking to class, she’s got all the normal concerns of a bright, fairly well-adjusted college kid – get the hang of biology, what’s going on with the boyfriend, the new part-time job is kinda fun, she’s got a meeting at the sorority house that evening, should she think about changing her major, she’s pleased with what her prof wrote on her essay, does she have enough cash to go back to buy that cute top she saw yesterday, does she need to register to vote here or back home (it’ll be her first time!) and if she votes back home can she get back to school in time for class the next day.  But she’s not alone with her interior monologue.  As she walks she talks to Sadie, texts with her Mom, asks a question of her favorite professor, checks to see if the price of the bling she’s got in her online shopping bag has gone down.  All this happening within a storm of social media, all the alternative facts and values and arguments and ugliness and foolery, the shitstorm of the world she moves through.  It could be overwhelming, overpowering, and truly for some of her friends and acquaintances it is.  But ever since middle school she’s been learning how to compartmentalize, how to shift and ignore, what to pay attention to and what to let go by.

She’s not perfect at it (no one ever is), but mostly she knows how to avoid getting sucked into the rabbit holes, how to turn away from the toxicity, how to block the trolls.  She’s an expert at privacy controls, at serving as her own gatekeeper.  The whirlwind isn’t strange to her.  It’s the way the world has always been.

On the cusp of adulthood, trying to figure out her future, her relationships, what’s expected of her, what she’s good at, what she wants to become.  Follow the rules or break them?  Take the safe route or the road less traveled?  Change the world or try to fit in?  Accept the answers she’s been given or try to carve out new ones?  Living in the whirlwind doesn’t make dealing with these fundamental questions any easier.  Surviving it at speed requires new modes of thinking, new strategies for interacting with the things in the world.

She needs to figure out how to decide what’s true.  She trusts her Mom, and that helps (she has friends who reject everything their parents try to tell them).  In my world, we’ve lost the comforting reliance on expertise.  We had a naïve trust in “science”.  But that lazy confidence was broken years before she was born.  In her world, she knows that whatever position someone takes, someone else will rage at it, scream that it’s wrong, that the person who holds it is an idiot, a sheep, a racist, a deplorable, an ignorant dupe.  She knows to be skeptical.

I asked her once, “When I talk about you to people, as you know I will, what would you like me to tell them?”  She thought for a minute, taking the question seriously, “That I’m optimistic.  And that I’m a good friend.”  This seems to me solid ground for approaching adulthood.

She’s not an outlier – a Gallup poll from last September reported that 76% of Gen Z respondents believe “they have a great future ahead”, 82% believe they’ll achieve their goals.  The report was greeted with many versions of the headline, “Gen Z’s surprise optimism about the future”.  Yes, anxiety is high and they’re worried about their own mental health.  No surprise there, given how much social upheaval they’ve been raised on.  What surprises the headline writers, focused as they must be on their fear-mongering trade, is how upbeat most of them remain.

When Josie was five, we stayed overnight for Easter.  This was 2010.  As we were getting ready to go the following morning, Marian said, “When did you put the Wizard of Oz on your iPad?”  “I haven’t,” I said.  “Well she’s watching it.” Marian gestured to Josie, sitting on the couch with my newly acquired iPad on her lap.  “What...?”  Indeed she was.  I’d handed it to her while we got our stuff together.  She’d recognized the Netflix icon, tapped it, found her favorite movie.  No problem.  The whirlwind's a rough place, but Josie’s been finding her way around since, well, since she’s been finding her way around anywhere.

9.

I’m not a techno-optimist.  I’m not suggesting there’s no need to be concerned.  Children have always known there are monsters.  This has never stopped them being drawn into dark caves.⁶  Adults have done a poor job these last twenty years at helping kids find their way.  Across from us in the restaurant is a booth with two women and a young boy.  The boy (looks to be nine or ten) has paper and crayons in front of him, and I can see a bit of his scrawls.   As they eat, they’re all engaged in animated conversation.  After they’ve finished, though, the women pull out their phones and soon they’re absorbed.  The little boy gets restless, tries to regain their attention, fails, goes back to his coloring.  Two men join them, the husbands apparently, and soon their phones are out as well and when I look up again, the boy is leaning against his father’s arm, gazing at the phone.  But that’s still better than what I often see – adults giving the kids a phone or tablet because it keeps them quiet and occupied. 

We had no cultural norms to help defend us, no learned behaviors to help us withstand the bombardment by the dopamine hits of social media, encouraged by our IRL friends and all our new online only friends.  We didn’t know how dangerous it would be, we wail!   Nowadays the press is full of articles giving advice on how to pull yourself away from your phone.⁷  We didn’t know how hard it would be to give them up, didn’t realize our stupidities would live on the internet forever.  The kids have been hearing about online dangers their entire lives and are learning to cope.  The older generations fret about them rather than learning from them.

Printing begat the century of democratic revolutions as well as the century of genocides and total war.  Mark Twain wrote, “What the world is to-day, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage, for what he said in dreams to the angered angel has been literally fulfilled, for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favored.”⁸  Had he seen more of the 20^th century he might have recalculated that ratio, but he’d still’ve landed on a net positive, thin though the margin might be.

Freddie acknowledges that “advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary” but then goes on to say, “The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life.”  I’m not equipped to analyze the economics, but the daily experience of human life is surely becoming radically different.

I’ve always hated the imperative to manage “work-life balance”.  As if my worklife was separate from my “real” life.  That I could be in one or the other, but not both at the same time, and my challenge was to keep the one from intruding too far into the other.  What I wanted was seamlessness.  That all the many facets of my being – the librarian, the boss, the grandfather, the musician, the writer, the lover and companion – flowed into each other, overlapping and enlivening all the many characters I might be on any given day.  Not a balance of opposite poles, but a homeostasis⁹ of all my interdependent elements.

If the planet manages to survive the depredations of human foolishness¹⁰ this is how I imagine the dynamic that Josie’s children and their children will create.  One in which the whirlwind online is not part of some binary either/or but seamlessly some of the warp and woof of experience within which we struggle and live.  Perhaps much of what I consider the peak of artistic or emotional or all round human experience will be unavailable to them.  I can only imagine it as loss.  But they’ll be creating fabulous new ways of being in the world, ways I can’t imagine, no more than some medieval Bishop could picture a world in which a miner’s son would grow up to challenge everything he thought he knew about God’s purpose in the world.  It’ll be better in some ways, worse in others, but some version of Twain’s ratio will hold true.  Perhaps one day Josie will look back nostalgically, reflecting on the wonders of her world, thinking of all I’ve missed, “Oh, if only my Nonai could’ve seen this!  He’d’ve been amazed. He would’ve loved it!”

1. This was Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Crossref.  We’ve crossed paths a number of times (although not nearly often enough) over the years.  He’s the smartest guy I know at understanding the intersections of technology, scholarly publishing, and human behavior.

2. I first came across the term just the other day.  In a very weird coincidence – and you should definitely read their chapter on coincidences – I was sketching out these ideas one afternoon, getting to the part about Orality and Literacy and how Gutenberg was the next big shift in human consciousness just before I stopped for the evening.  After dinner, I continued my reading of the Science of Discworld and 30 minutes in, came to the spot where they are making EXACTLY THE SAME POINT about the invention of printing.

3. See his 2010 book The Shallows.

4. The story is told in Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude.  Stephen King (vocals, rhythm guitar) finagled a book contract and used the advance to fund their tour.  Each of the writers (Dave Barry – lead guitar, vocals; Barbara Kingsolver – keyboards, vocals; Ridley Pearson – bass, vocals; Al Kooper – music director; Amy Tan – vocals, whips, badass boots; among others) contributed a chapter, explaining how they got involved and what it meant to them.  The essays are funny, poignant, probing, self-revealing, and, of course, incredibly well written.

5. Those last moments of the Haunted Mansion ride where you’re turned to the mirror and see the ghost snuggled in between you and your companion.

6. The Moms4Liberty make two fundamental errors:  They mistake who the monsters truly are, and they think they can keep their children ignorant and pure.  Both mistakes do tremendous damage.

7. Most of which are being read on phones. 

8. “The Work of Gutenberg” Hartford Daily Courant, July 27, 1900.

9. A self-regulating process by which a living organism can maintain internal stability while adjusting to changing external conditions. There are a variety of helpful definitions here.

10. I’m not taking bets.