Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco says "Humans are crazy. We’re so enamored of technology that we don’t take the time to think about how best to use it. When it comes to reading, the need for speed is vastly overrated."

"I’m in my home, in the universe, and I’m connected." - Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs was, above all, a writer. Without formal study of the ‘subject’ of urbanism she wrote a feisty article in Fortune Magazine, "Downtown is for People" and the seminal book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Her words made the ‘big idea’ guys like Robert Moses look like boneheads.

Without formal study in economics, she wrote with intuitive pragmatism on the subject in "The Economy of Cities", "Cities and the Wealth of Nations, "Systems of Survival, "The Question of Separation," and several more.

A sharp critic, tireless activist, and prose-poet, she epitomized a fiercely independent mind.

To her the boast of "make no little plans" was a cock-eyed notion. She placed high value on small plans-- and the piecemeal...

"Life is an ad hoc affair and has to be improvised all the time. Big plans stifle the emergence of future alternative courses of action. Cities are not going to be humanized by building huge urban models."

To her mind change happens in small and even smaller ways at a level that cannot be seen by the casual eye. But nonetheless we know that it is happening because we see its effects.

At a Toronto conference in 1997 she railed against factories of ‘education.’ "I think we are misled by universities into thinking that there actually are separate and distinct fields of knowledge. For they all link up. Everything is a seamless web. It’s a very functional thing– not just a poetic expression."

She illustrated her points by using the example of fractals. "One thing holds another, reflects another, and so on and on to infinity." Her point was that everything starts at the smallest level...

"If you remove the big thing you can still have the little ones– but not vice-versa. The big thing would be hollow. So once you know fractals you live in all of them at once. I live at 69 Albany Avenue and also the universe."

Her thinking parallels the shift from traditional science (e.g. that the universe operates according to certain mathematical laws) to chaos theory. And as it turns out those old laws don’t hold up. They don’t necessarily predict what happens.

What was once thought to be order is chaos– behind which there is a complex order that results from the interweaving of many components... just like Jane Jacobs envisioned cities.

The Man Who Left Too Soon

Stieg Larsson was an investigative journalist and editor of the magazine Expo in Stockholm.

He had written since early childhood and was intrigued with crime fiction. To try his hand at it he outlined and began drafting ten books for his "Millennium Series," based on the narratives of Mikael Bloomkvist, a fictional publisher of Millennium Magazine, and Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker and researcher.

By 2004 he had completed the first three novels and was half-way through a fourth book, titled "Guds Hämd" (God’s Revenge). He delivered the three completed manuscripts to the editor of a small Swedish publishing house; a few weeks later he died of a heart attack.

When published in 2005, Larsson’s ‘Trilogy’ became a craze in Sweden. The first book, "Man Som Hatar Kvinnor," (Men Who Hate Women) was quickly released with the English publisher’s title "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

Translations of the next two books came in quick succession. For starters, 60 million copies sold in 50 countries. Three movie productions based upon the books were shot in Sweden, in Swedish with an array of language subtitles, in less than two years. The Hollywood version of the first story was released in 2011.

Because of the popularity of Larsson's books, tourism has greatly boosted Stockholm's economy. The airlines, hotels, cafes, retailers-- all  benefit.

Avid fans take the 'Larsson walk' and seek out his hangouts. Groups visit the streets they have 'seen in their minds,' apartment addresses of Bloomkvist and Salander, Expo offices, and much more while enjoying the glories of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

George Will's oped columns appear in 360 U.S. newspapers.

This puts him in first place for total reach: circulation to 52 percent of readers. Maureen Dowd comes in at 9th place, Paul Krugman at 11th, Bill O'Reilly at 29th, Frank Rich at 63d, Amy Gooman at 85th, and Ann Coulter at 95th.

These figures are pulled from the first deep analysis of columnists and content-- conducted by the researchers at Media Matters for America.

Its study shows that the political opinions of the majority of the top 100 oped writers are skewed toward conservative views. In fact there are three columnists who lean conservative for every one who leans progressive.

Just throw a dart at a map of the United States and pick up their local paper. Chances are good that you'd be reading a paper whose op-ed pages lean to the right. It's easy to surmise who has the upper hand.

Newspapers are still the source with clout.

Though they have suffered steady declines in readership over the last two decades, newspapers remain in many ways the most important of all news media-- because top-level decision-makers read them.

The Newspaper Association of America estimates that each copy of a weekday paper is read by an average of 2.1 adults, and the Sunday paper by an average of 2.5 adults, pushing total newspaper readership for daily papers to more than 116 million and Sunday papers to more than 134 million.

This means that some columnists reach tens of millions of readers-- and one, conservative George Will, actually reaches more than 50 million.

Another interesting tidbit: According to a Pew Research study, newspapers are the preferred news medium of those most interested in political news. These more aware citizens tend to influence the opinions of their families, friends, and associates.

Obviously, columnists have a unique ability to influence public attitudes and the national debate. And whether you examine them alone or as a group you'll find that conservatives have a clear advantage over their counterparts.

The report from Media Alliance is well worth a look.

In December 2003 two terrible things happened: Didion's only child, Quintana (37 and newly married) was hospitalized in a coma, suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. Five days later her husband of 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, died of cardiac arrest as the two were about to have dinner in their New York apartment. Didion was mixing the salad and lighting the candles. "Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

That moment propelled her from the ordinary to the catastrophic– and submerged her in a "magical" state of grief which "comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life." She found herself struck dumb by pathological bereavement; she was deranged in that she wanted to bring him back.

Both writers worked at home and were filled with the sound of each other’s voices. "For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age." Uncommonly close, "We were each the person the other trusted. There was no separation between our interests in any given situation." She yearned to talk to her husband about her grief, She made notes on her computer but did no real writing. She busied herself, but "stacking magazines seemed at that point the limit of what I could do by way of organizing my life."

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes... nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself."

Quintana was moved to the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, where Didion and Dunne had lived for most of their marriage. When she drove around she tried to avoid streets and places that triggered a sudden rush of memories. She took strange routes, yet the memories burst through.

She writes of her virtual disembodiment with unsparing candor. She arrived at a point where "The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place." Finally, she began to write "The Year of Magical Thinking." She wrote it fast, in lacerating, brutally candid fashion. Soon after she submitted her final manuscript, in August 2005, Quintana died. Didion decided not to alter the book. "It’s finished," she said.

When her book was announced the winner at the National Book Awards dinner, Didion climbed to the podium and said "Thank you." Her acceptance followed a written speech by the blustering Norman Mailer who received an honorary award. Her simplicity was appropriate.

Have we been Googled?

With the Age of the Enlightenment in the 18^th century came the "Republic of Letters."

The correspondence of Voltaire, Rousseau, and later Franklin and Jefferson, fill long shelves of volumes. Writers of the time courted patrons and wangled their way into salons and academies where reputations were made. The great flood of reading and writing was limited to the privileged, wealthy, and exclusive guilds. Access to the profusion of new knowledge was far from democratic.

Then came a more egalitarian approach. The British Parliament set the length of copyright at 14 years, renewable only once. In 1774, publishers sought to overturn this law, but they lost. When, soon after, Americans drafted the constitution, they agreed that 28 years seemed long enough to protect the interests of authors and publishers.

America was founded on these principles, with a twist. Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution establishes copyright and patents for limited times only and subject to the higher purpose of promoting "the progress of science and useful arts."

The Founding Fathers acknowledged "authors rights to a fair return on their intellectual labor," but put public welfare before private profits. "Free To All" was inscribed at the entrance of the Boston Public Library.

Now we see a dramatic shift on the "information landscape." Goggle has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online.

Authors and publishers sued the company for violation of copyright law. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement. The details are complex and will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers.

The settlement created an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of copyright holders. Google will sell access to a gigantic data bank composed primarily of copyrighted, out-of-print books digitized from the research libraries.

A "public access license" will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the books on one computer terminal– but there are restrictions.

Readers cannot print out any copyrighted text without paying a fee to the copyright holders. Of the seven million books the Google has digitized, one million are works in the public domain, one million are in copyright and in print. Five million are in copyright but out of print.

Google’s laudable goal is to promote access to information. But the class-action settlement makes the company invulnerable to competition.

Court approval of the settlement will take at least two years– so things are far from settled. But if its approved, Google will control digitizing of virtually all the books covered by copyright in the U.S.– a virtual monopoly of information.

It’s too bad the shareholders and future board members of Google are in control. When book digitizing began in the 1990's, the Library of Congress and allied research libraries could have designed a National Digital Library.

But it’s too late now. While the public authorities slept, Google took the initiative. Yes, we’ve been googled.