• Amazon is offering a year of free Amazon Prime membership to college students. That means free two-day shipping on most items. The student must have a .edu email address to be eligible.

• I enjoyed this article (and so many others) by Tom Hodgkinson at The Idler: “Discover How to Intersperse Loafing with Latin.” His reasons and approach are markedly similar to mine. Have any of you tried the Cambridge Latin Course  he mentions? We’ve enjoyed materials by Memoria Press and Classical Academic Press.

• Speaking of The Idler, these posts at Farm School and Mental Multivitamin prompted me to put Hodgkinson’s The Idle Parent on hold at the library. I read the first chapter yesterday via Kindle’s “sample this” feature, giggled my way through, read various bits aloud to Scott, forgave Hodgkinson for scorning the Wii, and enjoyed his Idle Parent’s Manifesto. “Play more, work less”: well, yes.

Scrivener. How is it possible none of my writer friends clued me into this sooner?

Listography, which is, at last, the internet notebook I’ve been looking for. The format just works for me.

Sam’s French toast recipe.

Kristen’s joy.

This incredible guitar arrangement of the Lyke Wake Dirge (a very old song, and “happy” is not the right word for it—moving, stirring, haunting—those are better).

Busy weekend around here, so this year I’ll just be cheering the rest of you on. Gatorade, anyone?

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There’s also the fact that numerous studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe.

The penalty is amplified by what brain scientists call switching costs. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information. On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher.

The whole piece, which is well worth a read, is based on Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Your Brain—the one mentioned in this recent post.

Could I be more self-conscious about including those hyperlinks?

“…in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.”

• Douglas Adams: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (1999)

“Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.”

• Reading Rockets: Three ways to ruin a good book

• “If Socrates Had E-Mail…”—About Kenyon—Kenyon College

Augustine’s brilliant emphasis on language as a means of passage between our interior selves and the external world, a bandwidth for the expression of desires, introduces a theme which resurfaces again and again, almost uncannily, in the consideration of communication or information technologies. What is striking is not the truism that media of communication provide a link between internal selves and the world around them; what is striking is the anxiety that surrounds that linkage. We find that anxiety even in Augustine’s conclusion, that language acquisition propelled him “into the stormy life of human society.”

• Trianon: A Novel of Royal France by Elena Maria Vidal in Literature & Fiction—Another title for my TBR list.

• mitali’s fire escape: Amazon as Publisher? An Insider’s View From YA Author Zetta Elliott—Excellent post. Zetta Elliott talks about her experience with AmazonEncore, a “program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.”

• Welcome to the April Carnival of Children’s Literature! | forwordsbooks (Did I really never post this? I just found this link in a draft. Doh!)