Ponderings
Why aren't students reading?
By Graham Vyse, Chronicle of Higher Educations, April 10, 2025
Aeon Magazine, 07 April 2015
Cybernetics
Weiner, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which, as I have said, embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it over into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even have the choice of suppressing these new technical developments. They belong to the age, and the most any of us can do by suppression is to put the development of the subject into the hands of the most irresponsible and most venal of our engineers. The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields, such as physiology and psychology, most remote from war and exploitation. As we have seen, there are those who hope that the good of a better understanding of man and society which is offered by this new field of work may anticipate and outweigh the incidental contribution we are making to the concentration of power (which is always concentrated, by its very conditions of existence, in the hands of the most unscrupulous). I write in 1947, and I am compelled to say that it is a very slight hope.
read the Introduction, pp. 3-42
Economist
Culture | Book-spurning: Is the decline of reading making politics dumber?
In America, the share of people who read for pleasure has fallen by two-fifths in 20 years, according to a study published in August in iScience, a journal. YouGov, a pollster, found that 40% of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024. Reading for displeasure is little better: as Sir Jonathan Bate, an English professor at Oxford University, has said, students “struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”. Even the educated young, another greybeard said, have “no habits of application and concentration”.
Such laments should be treated with caution: almost the only thing bookish sorts love more than books is complaining about books and reading.
Something else
Ojalá
Silvio Rodríguez is another of the leaders of the Nueva Trova movement, but he is interesting in that he is also a member of Parliament in Cuba. His Last.fm entry notes ...
He is known for his highly eloquent and symbolic lyrics. Many of his songs have become classics in Latin American music, such as Ojalá, Playa Girón and La maza. Rodríguez is well known for socially critical yet ambiguous lyrics, which have raised the suspicions of both the Cuban government and Cuban-American groups on various occasions.
Note the emotions among the audience.
Decades later, a much older Silvio Rodriguez with the same song and the same audience reactions.