Jason Alexander calls it in the Aurora aftermath

I'm late to this particular item, but in the wake of the horrific shootings in Aurora, Colorado, Jason Alexander has written an exceptional, common-sense essay in response to those who say that there can be no compromise on gun control.

As others have said, this is the best thing I've read since the shootings.

Jason Alexander:

(Via Daring Fireball)

Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?

This is a wonderful essay, written by Amanda Katz, commentator for NPR Books and the deputy editor of the Boston Globe Ideas section. While I don't usually quote from the end of a piece, her concluding paragraph is wonderful and I can't resist putting it up here, for those of you who might not read that far into her piece. But you really should read the whole thing.

But what do we lose as we bid farewell to what may turn out to have been a brief period in which common people owned physical books? I think of my own already excessive book collection, with its books that I have loved and worked on (as an editor and translator) and received as presents. Though I hope someone in the generation after mine will love living with them too, it doesn't really matter to me: I won't be there to see it.

But when I think of sorting through the boxes of my grandmother's books — even the ones we couldn't keep, or didn't want — and what we found there, I am grateful not to have been handed her Amazon password instead. Among all the gifts of the electronic age, one of the most paradoxical might be to illuminate something we are beginning to trade away: the particular history, visible and invisible, that can be passed down through the vessel of an old book, inscribed by the hands and the minds of readers who are gone.

Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?: ""