How Technology Is Changing How History Is Reported

“Online gathering spots represent a potentially radical change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for decades, if not centuries. By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people, “crowdsourcing,” as it’s increasingly called, may transform a discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a single historian toiling in the dusty archives.”

Book Review Editor Reflects On 10 Years Of Change

“When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, but it would have been recognisable to many of our past contributors. Now that world is more or less extinct. Many of the great names from those times (Hughes, Murdoch, Mailer, Heller, Gunn, Miller, Vonnegut) are gone. Books, meanwhile, have been pushed to the edge of the radar.”

Let Me Tell You About Myself!

Gradually, the memoir changed. I don’t know who gave permission to the thousands of unhappy, ill, abused or just dissatisfied people to feel it was OK to reveal in raw, vivid — and as it turned out, sometimes fictional — words their dark secrets, or just a bad day at the office, to the masses, but the technique proved successful.

The Class Wins Cannes’ Top Award

Laurent Cantet’s The Class is “about a teacher who is challenged by his students in a tough junior high school in Paris. In his acceptance speech Cantet noted he was disappointed that the film business has not been especially open to making films that are slightly offbeat. But with “The Class,” he said, he was able to accomplish something ideal to him.”