Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“How an Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell,” Kashmir Hill
“One important lesson of my sleuthing is that IP addresses, which get used as digital evidence in criminal trials and to secure search warrants, are not always reliable. Like Social Security numbers, they were a numerical system built for one purpose that are now used for something completely different.”
“Shakespeare’s Rotten Weeds, Shakespeare’s Deep Trenches,” William Logan
“A poet may make a poem worse in revision, may soften effects that give it the wrong conviction and finish when required for a chain of sonnets. Shakespeare likely had written the poems from immediate impulse, as his friendship with the Fair Youth developed, stumbled, had consequences. There was no need to polish them, because they were private. He passed a few to friends—which tells us little more than that he had friends.”
“Type Slowly: Word Processing and Literary Composition,” Dylan Hicks
“If, in one traditional view, literary perfection was either illusory or the province of poems and other short works, now, it seemed, even a long novel could be refined to an apotheosis of unalterable integrity.”
“Picturing Don Quixote,” Rachel Schmidt
“Whatever Cervantes’ initial idea, in the course of the last 400 years, Don Quixote has embarked on a journey in the world imagination that has taken the literary character far beyond its original conception. The book illustrations of Cervantes’ Don Quixote would play a decisive role in this — transforming not only the image of Don Quixote and his loyal servant Sancho Panza but also by giving life to the image of Cervantes himself.”
“Suspicious Minds,” Evan Kindley
“It is in detective and spy stories, Boltanski argues, that we find the clearest expression of many of the paranoid attitudes and ideas expressed more apologetically and self-consciously in the social sciences and in everyday political life.”