Janet Reitman’s feature article, “Jahar’s World,” a profile of the surviving suspect in the Boston bombing of April 15, 2013, doesn’t earn its position as the cover story for this issue of Rolling Stone. Nothing in it justifies giving what’s basically a rehash of the material already in circulation pride of place in this issue of the magazine. Which makes designating this as the cover story, with the use of Jahar’s selfie on the cover, a cheap trick. That offends me. […]
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I can bemoan the erosion of the analog library that I grew up loving as a quasi-sacral space, a physical site that embodied our cultural commitment to preserving our accumulated knowledge as imbedded in words on paper. And, at the same time, watching the children of my community surfing the net in our new postmodern branch library, I can also say, “Just look how beautiful it is. […] If you want to locate the exact time and place at which, by example, the right to privacy of the children of the rich and powerful was surrendered willingly by the trend-setting leader of the free world and his fashionable spouse, you need look no further than “the first hundred days” of the Kennedy Administration. […] Our newly renovated neighborhood library, a mashup of late 19th- and early 21st-century architectural styles,offers 40 computer stations and 10 loaner laptops with online access and printing, free wifi, DVDs and CDs. A perfect example of the postmodern library. It even has books. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
There Will Be Ink (3)
The compulsory worldwide education for which Malala Yousafzai called in her U.N. speech, though it will surely involve physical books and paper and pens, will rely increasingly on digital tools: computers, the internet, digitized books and periodicals accessed through digital libraries. And I’m convinced that the future of the illustrated book lies in the ebook or some other form of electronic delivery. […]