The most essential part of @paulsalopek 's reporting toolkit is a pen and notebook. You don't need high-tech tools to be a journalist.

— Out of Eden (@outofedenwalk) December 24, 2013

There’s been a flood of handwringing op-eds lately about how glassy-eyed mobile-phone zombies are ignoring each other at the restaurant instead of talking to another another. I think these pundits are somewhat overblowing the frequency of this behavior, frankly. Very similar alarms were raised about the wave of supposedly society-ending isolation that would wreaked by previous newfangled media — like the telephone in the late 19th century, and the Walkman in the 80s. We didn’t suffer a social apocalypse then, and I don’t think we’re going to suffer one now.

That said, I actually think the op-ed handwringing is useful in its own way. It’s part of how a society creates social codes around new technologies. When mobile phones inched into the mainstream in the 90s, people who bought them used to answer them, every single time they rang, whenever and wherever they rang: At the dinner table, at the funeral, while having sex. It took about a decade of this behavior peaking before society collectively began to realize this was kind of terrible behavior, and we starting poking fun at it — you saw lots of jokes about it, like that “inconsiderate cell phone man” ad that used to run before movies. And eventually we moved away from the behavior. We’re probably in the middle of this curve with social media.

Brain Pickings shares a 1936 recording of William Butler Yeats speaking. Looks like that PennSound archive is worth checking out.

When was the last time you wrote in cursive, other than a hastily scrawled signature on a receipt? For most of us, it’s not an everyday occurrence. But a couple of months ago, designer Cristina Vanko decided to change that: After discovering one of her dad’s old fountain pens and beginning to practice a little calligraphy, she spent a week writing every text message on her phone by hand.

Here's one designer whose belief in cursive script led her to handwrite all her text messages for a while. Of handwriting, she says

There are so many benefits lost when you replace the hand with the key,” she says, listing everything from hand-eye coordination to the ability for kids to recognize letter forms. “During handwriting, both sides of the brain are in sync and make connections that stimulate language, learning, and fluency in a more effective way.

I’ve tried to suggest that at least a portion of that pursuit can have gratifying economic results. (Plus it will not plunge us into an endless recession!) But that’s not really the point. The point is truth and beauty, without which our lives will lack grace and meaning and our civilization will be spiritually hollowed out and the historical bottom line will be that future epochs will remember us as a coarse and philistine people who squandered our bottomlessly rich cultural inheritance for short-term and meaningless financial advantage.

And that is why you should major in English.

Gerald Howard in today's New York Times