Odyssey Online

…with the holidays here what is better than holiday feasting, and reading about holiday feasting (okay, okay, spending time with family–now back to food).  For holiday reading on food and eating can we suggest the following new (or mostly new) books:

• Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life by Kim Severson
• Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes by Diane Tye
• 52 Loaves: the Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and the Perfect Crust by William Alexander
• Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe
• Food of a Younger Land Edited by Mark Kurlansky
• Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost the Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need it Back by Ann Vileisis
• A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America by James E. McWilliams
• A Short History of the American Stomach by Frederick Kaufman
• The Artful Eater: A Gourmet Investigates the Ingredients of Great Food by Edward Behr
• Save the Deli: The Search for the Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of the Jewish Delicatessen by David Sax

More blogging after Christmas…may restful days and good noshing attend your holidays!

…since we do blog about Facebook here, this is a fun map created by William Easterly about Facebook Connectedness: ergo, which Nations are the biggest Facebook users.  Visually compelling and illustrative of just what a big deal Facebook is…

…okay, going back to 2008 for this, but what Christine Rosen writes is worth going back for. Christine Rosen is one of the writers for the New Atlantis, and one of her specialties is writing about the real impact of networked information technologies in people’s lives.  Her observations are insightful, and often disturbing, as you ‘ll see in this essay The Myth of Multitasking.  With the holidays upon us, and with the season one that ideally lends itself to reflecting upon one’s life and ways, the essay is worth a look.  Further, we have a number of titles in the collection that can be recommended as spring boards for long winter nights spent offline, doing one thing at a time:

• The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox by John Freeman
• The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
• The Anarchist in the Library by Siva Vaidhyanathan
• 24/7 How Cell Phones and the Internet Change the Way We Work, Live, and Play by Jarice Hansen
• The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen
• Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neal Postman

The Postman text is a classic on the topic…

From Atlanticwire, a sampling of reactions to a Federal Trade Commission proposal that companies be regulated  in their ability to track one’s treks across the Internet.  For truly thoughtful commentary on what happens and should happen to the information one leaves in one’s tracks across cyberspace, see Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: Virtual Forgetting in the Digital Age…

…obviously, a hiatus from blogging (and not one that was planned).  Well with the first appreciable snow fall here in Canton, we resume, with a vengeance! (Blogging, tobogganing, blogging while tobogganing and all the joys of winter in Northern New York.) Two things that caught my eye in recent weeks, one, Andrew Sullivan’s comments on the future of Newsweek and magazines generally (more on this this week), and also Alexis Madrigal reporting on the Google Book algorithm.