What would you do right now if you wanted to read something stored on a floppy disk? On a Zip drive? In the same way, the web browsers of the future might not be able to open today’s webpages and images–if future historians are lucky enough to have copies of today’s websites at all. Says Cerf, “I’m concerned about a coming digital dark ages.”
That’s why he and some of his fellow inventors of the Internet are joining with a new generation of hackers, archivists, and activists to radically reinvent core technologies that underpin the web. Yes, they want to make the web more secure. They want to make it less vulnerable to censorship. But they also want to make it more resilient to the sands of time.
How can I judge a translation if I don’t know the original language? Time and again fellow reviewers have raised this question with me. We can tell if a book is fluent or not, elegant or not, lucid or not, but how do we know if the original is like this?
Conversely, if we can’t judge the translation, how can we arrive at an opinion about the book itself? It seems poorly written, but perhaps that is just the translator. Or vice versa of course. Are we reduced simply to saying that we like or don’t like the package, without any notion of who we should praise or blame?
For anyone whose actual childhood has been marked by Steven Spielberg films about childhood—who has watched it emerge and re-emerge as one of his inescapable obsessions—these will always feel like the most Spielbergian species of Spielberg film, no matter how many Munichs and Amistads the man makes. Now, this July, Spielberg will release his adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl children’s book The BFG, or the Big Friendly Giant. After a five-year run of stoic historical dramas—War Horse, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies—he’s again made an unapologetically magical, family-oriented film: a story about childhood, experienced largely through a child’s wide-open eyes.
Visiting a farmers market involves discovering new vegetables, swapping recipes and feeling good about consuming healthful foods while supporting small, local farms. But that feel-good experience comes at a price.