I’m still making frequent use of my text-to-speech script to create audio files out of long articles. [1] Like I’ve said, this is great because when I find something I want to read, I can just quickly convert it and then listen later. Here are a few things I’ve read/listened to recently that I likely would not have read in their entirety if I had to stare at the computer screen the whole time:

  • Newsweek’s Secrets of the 2008 Campaign, a long behind the scenes look at both campaigns that you’ve probably heard about elsewhere. I think all together it’s like 6+ hours of audio, which is kinda silly, but I listened to it over the course of several days worth of commuting & chores. If you’re in election withdrawal, it’s a good way to go over the election again.
  • Welcome to the Party, a review of Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of Angels by Paul Starr. The basic argument is that increasing partisanship and increasingly clear divisions between the two major parties isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
  • Geek Pop Star, a profile of Malcolm Gladwell. Like a lot of people, I find Gladwell’s work a bit too cute sometimes, but I still read them & enjoy them, even when I get annoyed with them. This is an ongoing interest of mine: how does one present academic research in a public-friendly way without some degree of oversimplification? Put another way: name one “public intellectual” who has written a popular book that hasn’t been torn apart by insiders in their field for oversimplifying things. Some of my favorite books in recent years have been by experts in other fields writing books that aim to translate the findings of those fields for a wider audience. (And, of course, this is our job at contexts, as well.) Gladwell’s a journalist though, and this profile takes a look at how that shapes the way he presents ideas.
  • Does Religion Make You Nice?, by Paul Bloom. An essay in Slate magazine that argues that it’s the community aspect of religion—not the belief part—that contributes to a “happiness gap” between the religious and atheists…at least in the US. This is pretty much the argument virtually any sociologist would guess at, but it’s probably a bit surprising to many & this is a good read. (Bloom’s book Descarte’s Baby is one of those research-made-accessible books I referred to above.)
  • The Misunderstood DMCA. The DMCA has been widely vilified for instituting draconian intellectual property laws, but at the same time, this article argues that another provision of the DMCA—which gave ISPs and services immunity for intellectual property violations of their users—has been central to the flourishing of “Web 2.0″ as we know it.
  • The Genius Behind Steve, a profile of Apple COO Tim Cook in Fortune. An interesting read for us Apple Fanboys.

Footnotes

  1. My current method is a little different though: instead of going from the clipboard to Automator, I’ve found it’s better to paste into a plain text file first and then pass the file to the Automator script using the automator command line tool. I’m actually close to having a bash-only way to do it, but I don’t want to post it here until I get some kinks worked out first. [↩]