For the tech addicts among us.

“Did you know that now, thanks to iPhone, you can use location services to tell your friends where are you are at any given moment, and if they’re on iPhone and have that same app they can find you, and then you can then ask iPhone to tell you if there are any Tex-Mex restaurants within a five-block radius, and what movies are playing at the nearest cinema? Then you can use Twitter (or, rather, one of the 14,000 Twitter apps) to tell your followers what you’re up to, and automatically feed that into your Facebook page so that your Facebook friends can comment on your movie plans, and advertisers can scour your personal messages and use keyword searches to send target messages to each of you, and deep thinkers like Robert Scoble and Chris Anderson will reassure you that you are not just getting sucked into the maw of the brain-killing machine, and this is not just mindless time-wasting twattle but is in fact extremely profound and revolutionary and important and intellectually challenging. Because in the old days you just read books and that was so passive, but now you’re so engaged and interactive, you’re not just a media consumer but you’re also a media creator — why, in fact, you’re a public intellectual — and if you don’t fully immerse yourself in every last bit of this shit then you will no longer be participating in your culture which means you will lose your job and everyone will laugh at you because you just don’t get it and you might as well be some 90-year-old dude sitting in a pee-stained bathrobe drooling.”

Thanks to Alan Jacobs for this.

Steiner on the Bible as Inspired Literature

I've been wrestling with the question regarding to what extent we ought to read the Bible "as any other book." I just got access to George Steiner's review of Alter and Kermode's Literary Guide to the Bible. His basic critique is that the recent trend evident in The Guide reduces the Bible to mere literature without accounting for its otherness. I love this quote in reference to the book of Job:

"I can--just--come to imagine for myself that a man of more or less my own biological and social composition could have written "Hamlet" or "Lear" and gone home to lunch and found a normal answer to the question "How did it go today?" I cannot conceive of the author of the Speech Out of the Whirlwind in Job writing or dictating that text and dwelling within common existence and parlance." (Steiner, "The Good Books," The New Yorker [Jan 11, 1988], 97)

Islamic Superheroes

The BBC runs a spot on Islamic Superheroes today, created by the Kuwaiti psychologist Dr Naif al Mutawa. He writes an open letter to his sons explaining why he created these characters. A quote:

So, at the age of 32, I uncapped my pen to create a concept that could be popular in the East and the West. I would go back to the very sources from which others took violent and hateful messages and offer messages of tolerance and peace in their place. I would give my heroes a Trojan horse in the form of THE 99. Islam was my Helen. I wanted her back.