I want this book. The problem is I don’t want to pay $324.79 for it either. Looks like a great collection of essays. It has one of my favorite articles on the history of intellectual property by Carla Hesse, which you can download for yourself here.

In a mere 20 pages she conveys not only a general history of IP law in Europe and the United States,(which she actually makes riveting) but captures the philosophical contradictions and problems that have marked and marred IP as it has traveled from nation to nation and as it has grown in scope and depth in the last 200 years. I cannot recommend it enough.

One of my favorite things to watch are the “making of [movie, documentary etc] segments that are now routinely included in any DVD. It is nice to look behind the curtain and see exactly what choices are made, what is excluded, and why they are made.

I wish that more books, especially academic ones, had a “making of” section, giving a window into these choices. We are not exactly encouraged to include this commentary in the book itself but one can find this type of insight in author interview. I recently read one such interview with the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. The interview is on his site and the original is here.

There are a couple of things that I found particularly interesting, such as how to treat iconic figures such as RMS and ESR [not as researchers, for example ] and the importance of letting your research and thinking brew over a fairly long period of time, despite the pressure of publishing fast, quick and dirty, which is especially strong with anything “digital.”

The book is hefty and long, but as is emphasized in the interview, it is also pragmatic and readable. If folks on Planet have not yet checked it out and are not ready to commit to a long book, I would checkout Chapter 6 on the creation of the copyleft. It is sure to please academics and geeks alike.

Anthropology and the social sciences in general are not at the forefront of thinking of open access in publishing but thanfkfully there is a crew of anthropologists who are thinking about such questions and have some insights about the (sorry) direction our national organization has decided to take. Read more about it here. The interviews are featured in this Cultural Anthropology piece.

A month ago, I picked up a copy of Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd, and finally got around to reading it the last few days. The prospect of reading an entire book on nerds was exciting—I was a nerd after all—but I have to admit, I was also a little skeptical when I first leafed through the pages. I thought there might be too much auto-biographical mush filling the pages. But I was pleasantly surprised. Within his cool, calm, accessible, and measured prose, there is, to be sure, a dose of autobiographical tales (and this is part of what gives him his “cred”) but these are weaved richly and deftly into a series of ruminations and explanations—anthropological, psychological, literary, and historical in nature—on what makes up a nerd.

What are nerds? Who are nerds? These are the types of basic questions he asks and spends the whole book answering. On the one hand, to be a nerd is as simple and unremarkable (though not so fun) as being designated by others such. Neither ascribed nor achieved status, this form of nerdom is bequeathed by others and accepted reluctantly, if at all.

Yet there is a whole lot more to nerdiness than imputation. First, he explores many types of nerds in relationship to their behaviors and activities (gamers, D & D players, science fiction fans, those that blast to the past through the Society of Creative Anachronism, and even faux-nerds that now populate hipster neighborhoods such as Williamsburg and Wicker Park). Along with giving a window into the lives of these folks, most of whom were probably nerds growing up and still may be sort of nerdy in their behavior, he provides a decent historical genealogy of the word as well as the broader cultural context in the United States that would make a nerd a recognizable figure decades later when it was popularized in print and TV.

To work out how American developed its concept of a nerd,” writes Nugent, “it helps to establish how American arrived at its concept of a sportsman.” He argues that the move from an agricultural to an industrial society helped prompt the rise of sport as a method and cultural marker to “reclaim physical mastery” which was marked somewhat dramatically in the Ivy League institutions that started to valorize sport and masculinity (University of Chicago did not seem to follow the trend and hence it is known as a haven for nerds). Given this overarching context, where masculinity was defined through sport and body, the nerd, culturally speaking, lost out.

The term itself also has a specific history. First appearing in the pages of Dr Seuss as a mythical animal, nerd, it was only later at a fairly nerdy school, RPI, whereby it would take on its current and more familiar usage. RPI published a college humor journal by the name of Bachelor, which started, in the 1960s, to feature a dud by the name of Nurdly and soon after, the term nerd became used for any dud. Thanks to the SNL skits featuring Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, nerd eventually became a house hold name by the late 1970s.

If the term nerd has a recent history, perhaps the importance of Nugent’s book is how it goes elsewhere to help us understand nerdom. One fascinating place he goes is to broader (and often negative) cultural representations of the “Jew” and the racism they faced who were in part discriminated against because of their extreme intellectual dedication, which he argues “suggest Jews sometimes played a role in certain popular imaginations not so different from that of today’s nerd.” He then puts this into play with other discussions of racism such as old fashioned racism against African Americans to make the excellent point that nerds and Africa/African Americans are also in the popularly imaginary, diametrically opposed (and Weird Al makes this same point or reproduces this imaginary here). (more…)

Who knew that rants at Starbucks could be the subject of a seemingly interesting lingustic article.

Tonight at the Halfking is a reading by the author of American Nerd, a book that will be high on my reading list (and who knows, maybe I will assign in my course on hackers, as you know, hacking is related to nerd culture too

It is the end of the semester as well as the end of my first year of full time teaching. It has been quite a handful, mouthful, and especially mindful but I am happy to say that I like a lot more than I dislike it, which bodes well for the future. I would like to spend some time writing about teaching and what I enjoyed to teach (and what the students like) but for now I want to note what was my favorite book of the academic year, which unsurprisingly, was fiction (and thus nothing I taught). The book is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by MIT professor, Junot Díaz and I read it over my winter break. It is a heart breaking but deeply humorous story that I could barely put down and I can’t wait till his next novel and will gladly wait the 10 years it took him to write this one after his amazing book Drown.

It is about the life, trials, and tribulations of an unlikely character, a Dominican SUPER NERD by the name of Oscar Wao who has more than a lot of trouble scoring with the ladies (a “lovesick ghetto nerd” in the words of the author. Or to put in Dominican speak, he is no “tigre”). In the process of his many failures and attempt at love and lust, you learn about the experiences of Dominican immigrants in the tri-state area, the brutal history of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic as well as a good dose of odd culture folklore (both geek and Dominican, if you can believe it!) and all of this is told in a style that manages to combine the rhythm and passion of a poetry slam with classic issues of tragedy common in Greek literature. It is books like these which make me a little down on purely academic ones which tend to lack the style, pizazz, rhythm, flow, narrative, and heart needed to make you fall in love with words on a page.

Nice to see that The Atlantic is now free.

One might think that it is too early to declare the existence of a “classic” work on the Internet given how the Internet as a widely accessible communications networks is barely out of its pre-teen years, But if there is one book that I would say is a classic, it’s Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life. There were plans underway to release it under a libre license but after I ran into Julian at the AAAs in November, I got the scoop that things had come to a screeching halt.

So a few days ago I was surprised to find in my inbox, this nicely crafted announcement that My Tiny Life is more or less (more more than less) free as a free bird. This is good news and his story about the trials and tribulations of getting My Tiny Life out of the noose of copyright, is an interesting one, involving among other things, outsourced Indian Labor. Who knew.

And while I am on the topic, I meant to write about who, among the many authors I assigned this last fall, took the cake among students as their favorite book/article. Somewhat, unsurprisingly, Dibbell’s more recent Play Money was the champion. Most of the comments were relayed in class but here is one of the more amusing comments indicating the love:

Reading Julian Dibbell’s Real Money, Or How I quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot was exceedingly more interesting than I expected.

And then just yesterday, another student wrote me an email telling me he read and re-read the book over his holiday break and wants to get Dibbell inivited to NYU to speak (which would be great, though I admittedly have no idea how to make that happen given my recent arrival here). But clearly, there is another classic in the making.

Thankfully students liked many other readings and I think there were two other clear winners: Carl Elliot’s Better than Well , Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal. and Michael Sandel’s The Case against Perfection. This is of course no surprise to me as I picked these books because I knew they would teach themselves.

When you live in NYC and have a demanding job, you tend to ignore the city (at least I do), that is until guests descend upon your place. And since a Large Family Clan has recently landed in my apt, I have spent the last few days trekking north, south, east, and west, across bridges, in parks, and memorials, eating, drinking, and passing out at night after the constant flurry of activity.

Yesterday we headed pretty much as far north as you can go to pay a visit to the lovely Cloisters sitting high on a cliff. The Cloisters provides stellar views of the Hudson at the same time as it transports you back in time when a lot of energy was put into scribbling religious material on paper in really stunning and ornate ways. I have not paid a visit to the Cloisters since my undergraduate days and after yesterday’s stroll, I am sorry I waited until the frigid winter to do so. It is an *incredibly* serene place, especially the inner courtyard gardens, and if you need serenity (and I think anyone who lives in NYC, needs to counter the low-grade and high-grade exposure to constant noise with some noiseless environments), this is the place to go.

We then made our way to the Columbia area to check out the campus, St. John the Divine (currently under renovation), and so I could pick up a book being held for me at the Book Culture bookstore (which I wish was a lot closer to me than it is)… It was nice to escape the blustering winter conditions and browse the rows of books in a warm and well lit environment. But after purchasing Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Digital Age, parts of which I am hoping to teach next semester, and flipping through the book, my new found serenity was replaced by some serious offense when the only index I could find was an author index. There was no subject index in sight, which at the time left me totally surprised!!

Anyone who is in the business of using books as research tools knows the index is —-> indispensable. And a well indexed book is much appreciated (never mind what a non-existent index does). In fact, I felt like I stumbled on some rare object because I don’t think I have ever seen an academic book published in the last 30 years not sporting this useful tool and I wonder if 1) I have a bunk copy 2) The editors/authors forgot to include it and just pushed out the book anyway 3) This was a willful choice made for reasons hidden to the reader. I think I may have to contact Duke University Press and let me know they momentarily robbed me of my serenity