Voice & Tone is a site developed by the people behind Mailchimp to lay out their house copywriting style. It’s exemplary in a few ways:

1. This is how to make a simple but charming website. It’s got bright colors, clear structure, intuitive navigation (including keyboard shortcuts), smooth animation, and it’s responsive to different screen sizes. Try resizing your browser window.
2. This is how to write for the web. Omit needless words, pick meaningful expressions, and teach your readers something new. When appropriate, be funny.
3. This is how to market your company to people who might not otherwise care—by sharing and defending the philosophy behind it. I don’t see many internal style guides with their own domain names.

This is good work.

This post is adapted from an assignment for an American intellectual history seminar.

The first half of Vannevar Bush’s Modern Arms and Free Men (1949) is a straightforward explanation of the progress made in military technology since 1918. This is the “Modern Arms” part of the book: Bush wants to be certain the reader understands recent developments before he tackles what they mean for “Free Men.” He is careful not to alienate readers without an existing grasp of the subject, and he also seems to step very carefully in establishing his authority: “For ten years,” he writes, “thanks to the accidents that direct men’s lives in a democracy, I was in a position to see as much as any single man could see… It is part of the obligation of any citizen who has been given such responsibility and opportunity as I have, no matter by what accident, to set down for the record what he has learned, and to share with others any light it may throw on the great question of war or peace that haunts us all.” In the second half of the book, he ruminates on democracy and the coming Cold War, as well as on the influence of modern military technology on both issues.

In general, Bush comes across as a technocrat who believes that scientifically trained experts can and must have a disproportionate influence on national policy, particularly as the United States continues to face off against totalitarian powers like the Soviet Union. But this technocracy and elitism is tempered by a democratic idealism that seems to rely on alchemy, a faith in a political process that works in eldritch ways to make everything turn out for the best.

This is what paragraphs were invented for:

What does Caborca know of Huisiachepic, Huisiachepic of Caborca? They are different worlds, you must agree. Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.

—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (143)

I’m happy to announce that my senior thesis, “A Man in Time of War”: How Colonial Boys Became American Men, 1765–1775, is for sale on the Amazon Kindle store.

This post is adapted from an assignment for an American intellectual history seminar.

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) is a collection of William James’s lectures on what you might call the parapsychology of religion. It’s an exploration of personal religiosity through two lenses: first, the philosophy of pragmatism that James would come to symbolize, and second, the experimental psychology that James had pioneered at his Harvard laboratory in the late 19th century.

The quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise.

A mesmerizing Tumblr blog: still shots of the NCC-1701 interior, from the classic Star Trek show.

It’s even slightly cooler than the duel with broadswords. I hope this story is true or at least included in the upcoming movie.

I’m sure this feature has been around since the 1990s. (Clicking this brings up a dialog box for finding and deleting useless characters.) But it’s one more reason to love the premier OS X text editor, BBEdit.

And there’s zapgremlins.com—apparently a lavish tribute to this menu item.

Can’t believe I just learned about this. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been right-clicking on the divider line and then clicking “Turn Hiding On.” But you can hide the dock immediately using the global shortcut of CMD-OPT-D.

William Hogeland responds to my last post with a clarification:

What I’m really saying isn’t just that history isn’t interesting until contested. It’s that history doesn’t exist independently of contest.

I can agree with that, but perhaps it’s more useful to agree with Hogeland and then say that most of the cultural products we consider “history” are really something else, or something less. This reminds me of the last few paragraphs of a two-part article by David Greenberg in Slate:

This is historian William Hogeland responding to yet another poll that demonstrates a basic lack of public knowledge about American history and civics:

There’s a widely held idea, I think manifestly false, that arguments like these, over interpretation, can’t be profitably held until people are in possession of the same set of neutral, agreed-upon facts. Hence the endless force-feeding of the same baby food that people keep spitting out. To me, the real “American ignorance” problem lies in a patronizing tendency by educators, writers, public historians, and cultural institutions (hello, PBS) to seek to correct ignorance by imposing as indispensable fact what are actually overdetermined interpretations, even while denying every interesting social, economic, and political ramification of those interpretations.

Michael H. Rowe for The Millions:

In Dick’s novels, his plots are like thinking machines. You have to operate them like a piece of equipment to understand what they do, not expose one gear and say, Wow, it’s spinning so fast…

Dick isn’t out to crystallize a particular sentiment. He does not aim to be quotable—to be, in a word, reducible. Instead, his novels feel like labor, as though they are tabulating the results of some desperate experiment.

I’ve always found it really difficult to write anything about PKD’s books in my ongoing reading log, but never wanted to stop reading them. The “desperate experiment” running through most of these books is an attempt to express and defend feelings of dread, paranoia, and psychological instability.

One of my former Berkeley professors reviews the new book by one of my favorite science historians, James Gleick. I’m planning to read this soon, though Nunberg has some problems with it:

… His focus on information as a prime mover and universal substance leads him to depict its realm as a distinct place at a remove from the larger social world, rather than as an extension of it.

I’ve read Gleick’s biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton and recommend them both.

To what Object, are my Views directed? What is the End and Purpose of my Studies, Journeys, Labours of all Kinds of Body and Mind, of Tongue and Pen? Am I grasping at Money, or Scheming for Power? Am I planning the Illustration of my Family or the Welfare of my Country? These are great Questions. In Truth, I am tossed about so much, from Post to Pillar, that I have not Leisure and Tranquility enough, to consider distinctly my own Views, Objects and Feelings.—I am mostly intent at present, upon collecting a Library, and I find, that a great deal of Thought, and Care, as well as Money, are necessary to assemble an ample and well-chosen Assortment of Books.

—Diary of John Adams, January 30, 1768.

This week Bob Dylan played his first gig in China. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, in a very poorly thought-out opinion piece, is upset with him for “selling out,” as uptight people of all persuasions have been for the last 48 years:

Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he… let the government pre-approve his set.

Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression…