The first thing that popped into my head when I played with the iPad was the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age (What? I’m a nerd since forever. On the other hand, you should see my new shoes. I look good, New York City. These shoes are both stompy and tall.) After standing expectantly in a storm of dust and debris as everything falls down around us, it is the first widely comprehensible thing visible as the air begins to clear. Hence the fuss. We’ve known that the decay of the pieces of the unwieldy structures of old civilization—science, journalism, media, government, the housing market, is resulting in the most fecund cultural muck in recent history, but it has been hard to imagine exactly what will grow out of it. The iPad provides a glimpse of what books look like in the future. It’s exciting to a lot of different people for a lot of different (dubious) reasons. A depressing amount of traditional publishing is looking to it as salvation. They’re lumbering forward, planning to leap en masse to this new unbaked model. Despite years of preparation, Apple itself, with it’s infuriating attachment to DRM⁰¹ might well be stomping on it’s own toes.⁰² The heaviest organizations won’t make it across (Time tries to charge $4.99 an issue), but why not try; they’re already in the process of losing everything. Those who land intact will transform themselves, diminished as they scramble to their feet. Meanwhile, the abandoned media is momentarily clear for individual humans to appropriate and manipulate at our own scale, sans all the layers of pointless complexity that caused the traditional organizations to buckle under their own weight. Eventually those organizations successful in the new world will realize the error of abandoning the old things so completely; and new, monstrously complex businesses will spring up and block out the sun at ground level here, but for the moment we have the chance to make something idiosyncratic and personal without much risk. We have nothing to lose because we have nothing here at all. It’s a joyful, momentary poverty that has all the crazy mystery of a Halley’s comet sighting. As Ben Terrett put it, the internet says “We have broken your business, now we want your machines.”

Ugh, I can’t believe I just mentioned the iPad. Scrub my (two) typing fingers with soap. Here, have some Shut Up Foodies and let’s pretend that didn’t happen.

Also, quickly, some Edith Stein and The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila. I put these here instead of where they belonged, after the earlier reference to my overweening foot-ular vanity. They are keeping me awake at night, but I am not converting to or from anything any time soon. Let’s have more lives of people who heard directly from God! And even quicklier, have I mentioned how brilliant that biography of Heloise and Abelard by James Burge is? Maybe, maybe not. Brilliant it is. Read it.