I'll get back to the demographic changes of our age and their implications for higher ed, tomorrow.  Tonight I'm gonna shovel some links your way. They pile up quick around here.

A nice reflection on the number of times books have been predicted to be dead, and how they have continually foiled those predictions.  This seems to me a very good point:

"If you believe that infrastructures have consistently done more to shape reading than have this or that device, then the question becomes not whether we read in print or online or in some as-yet-unimagined medium but rather in the interactions through which we get our hands on books—and even more fundamentally, the interactions that awaken a desire for them."

By the way, I also wrote about books last year, in a way that agrees with this piece too.  So maybe I'm prone to like it.  (My small piece is the final one in the above collection.)

On a related matter: It turns out that reading on paper instead of screens is more conducive to learning.  Should you print out this blog post?  Maybe not. But you might want to print out this article and keep it around.

I met this terrific young historian this week, by the name of Ananya Chakravorti.  She's an early modern historian of Brazil and India--so both a scholar of the trans-Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.  She struck me as very sharp and thinking beyond the bounds of her discipline.  For a taste of her public reach, check out this piece on caste.  For one of her more elaborate pieces, I recommend her recent essay "Mapping 'Gabriel'," in the journal Past and Present.

This is a really interesting analysis of how the misogyny at the heart of much Eastern Orthodoxy--forbidding women to be priests--is inadvertently creating a good number of Eastern Orthodox women who are scholars.

Anderson Cooper interviews Stephen Colbert.  Turns out they have a really good conversation on grief and loss.  If grief and loss are amenable to a "really good conversation."

Night night!