By Barbara Fister. Joshua Kim raised a question yesterday that helped me build the bridge I was trying to construct between two stimulating blog posts that seemed connected, though I wasn’t sure how. One, a Gigaom post by Laura Hazard Owen, describes the ways some writers are framing the Hachette-Amazon dispute in terms that echo Tea Party rhetoric: we’re scrappy independents standing up for freedom against the elites and the snobs. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. Imagine a service that will let you get your hands on almost any book you want, however obscure or expensive, for a very low price. Imagine the opportunity to indulge your curiosity impulsively and read all you want to without going broke. We call it Interlibrary loan and if we had to invent it today, it probably would lead to Congressional hearings and new laws banning it - unless some hot tech startup invented it and called it “Uber for books” or something. Read more...

By John Warner. I’d wager that Charleston has more great restaurants per capita than any city in the world. This wasn’t always the case, apparently. Last year I interviewed Chef Sean Brock of Charleston’s Husk and McGrady’s for a magazine article and he told me about coming to Charleston from Wise County, Virginia, for culinary school and being excited to try this regional dish called “Hoppin’ John” he’d heard so much about. Read more...

By John Warner.  According to the Inside Higher Ed report of his on-stage Q&A at the National Association of College and University Business Officers, Bill Gates was identified as a “voracious” reader of education-related texts, be it of “grand treatises” or “bone-dry technical reports.”
Given Gates’ apparent sincerity and desire to improve education at both the K-12 and college and university levels, I believe we can take him at his word. Read more...