Fallows has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic for over 25 years, based in Washington DC, Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and now Beijing. You can read his “Voices” blog entries on the Atlantic site. In 2003 he won a National Magazine Award for his article “The Fifty-First State?” (The Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 2002, vol. 290:no.4, pp. 53-64), which talked about “the effects of military victory of the United States in the Iraq War.”

His work has appeared in many other publications as well. Search the article databases such as Academic Search Complete and MasterFILE Premier (Ebsco) to find some of his articles (try the search au fallows james).

His book, Postcards from Tomorrow Square, is available in Andersen Library’s 3rd-floor Main Collection (DS706 .F3 2009), or UWW students and staff may request it from other UW libraries by using the free Universal Borrowing service. Requested materials arrive in 2-4 weekdays.

Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials.

Anyone interested in additional information about comets, Galilei, or astronomy in general will find a wealth of material in the University’s Library. A search of the Library Catalog would find books such as Comet by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (3rd-floor Main Collection, QB721 .S34 1985) or Galileo: his science and his significance for the future of man (3rd-floor Main Collection, QB36.G2 D48 1996). More about comets may be found online, e.g., the blog “The transient sky – comets, asteroids, meteors” or NASA’s web site (“Green comet approaches Earth”).

LECTURE ABSTRACT: “Four hundred years ago this spring, a feisty Italian physics professor Galileo Galilei heard about the invention of the telescope in what today is Holland and set about building his own. By Summer 1609, he was showing it to important people; and by Fall 1609, he was making the first recorded astronomical observations with this telescope. These observations obtained the first real evidence that astronomical objects were not perfect and unchangeable and that the Earth probably revolved around the Sun.

In celebration of this important event, the International Astronomical Union has declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy, dedicated to bringing the universe down to Earth through lectures, exhibits and observing sessions for people of all ages. Whitewater Observatory begins its participation in the IYA with a lecture about the significance of Galileo’s first observations and about the most recent observations of Comets Lulin and Kushida, both visible in the night sky this month.”

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!

The Library of Congress not only has a blog, it tweets too… follow it at http://twitter.com/librarycongress. And there’s more of the government on Twitter than you’d guess, I’ll bet. Check out http://twitter.com/dotgov, http://twitter.com/nasa, http://twitter.com/nihforhealth, http://twitter.com/National_Ag_Lib, http://twitter.com/femainfocus, and http://twitter.com/usepagov.

Good grief. Who has time to read all this?! But if you’re interested in something your government is doing, there are no excuses for being uninformed since there are so many ways to keep in touch now.

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!

You may have heard Dr. Hawks on NPR (National Public Radio) discussing Darwin and human evolution, and he is featured in an article “Are we still evolving?” (photo online at “They don’t make homo sapiens like they used to”) in Discover magazine’s March 2009 issue honoring 150 years of evolution (available in the Browsing area just inside the Library entrance). You can also learn more about Dr. Hawks and neandertals from his weblog.

Search the Library Catalog for books in the University Library about neandertals, human evolution, and Darwin, such as Reflections of our past: how human history is revealed in our genes (3rd-floor Main Collection, GN289 .R45 2003) or Darwin’s ghost: The origin of species updated (3rd-floor Main Collection, QH375 .J66 2000).

2009 is a special year for Darwin enthusiasts because it marks two major anniversaries: 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809) and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species.

It’s sponsored nationally by the Society of American Archivists. The UW-Madison student chapter’s Archives Month 2008 blog describes an archival repository in Wisconsin each weekday to “make the public aware of the wide array of historical materials that are available to them, whether for scholarly research, genealogical study, or just for fun.”

Your University Library is one of these repositories! As part of the Area Research Center network in the state, we are responsible for records for Jefferson County, Rock County, and Walworth County. People from all over contact us to research local history or their genealogies (looking for naturalization papers and other information about ancestors who immigrated to these counties). In addition, the University Library maintains the University Archives, which contains such items as photos, records of many types including personnel files and scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, and even hats. The Library also houses past issues of the Royal Purple and The Minneiska (the campus yearbook, published through 1991).

If you’d like to explore the archival resources available to you, contact the Area Research Center/Archives staff at (262) 472-5520 or email archives@uww.edu. This Archives office within University Library is open Monday-Friday 9am-5pm.

According to the lecture web site, Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason (3rd-floor Main Collection, E169.Z83 J33 2008) challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation.

If UWW’s copy of the book is checked out, UWW students, staff and faculty may borrow it from other UW libraries by using the free Universal Borrowing service. Other books by Jacoby are available from University Library and other UW libraries also.

Some of Jacoby’s articles in periodicals and newspapers may be found by using Library article databases, e.g., searching for her as an author in Academic Search Premier finds articles including: “Religious Correctness and the American Press” in Free Inquiry (Apr/May2004, pp. 37-39) and “In Praise of Secularism” in Nation (4/19/2004, pp. 14-18).

She regularly contributes to “On Faith,” a Newsweek/Washington Post blog on religion.

Additional information about Ms. Jacoby is available from the susanjacoby.com web site.

Carr suggests that our use of the Internet is affecting the way our brains work. Whereas he used to read entire books, now that he spends time surfing the Internet he finds that his attention wanders after reading only a couple of pages. Carr cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, who suggests that the reading style promoted by the Internet stresses efficiency and immediacy at the expense of our capacity for deep reading, making readers “mere decoders of information.”

“Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.“

And Carr adds,

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.“

Does the use of the Internet affect our ability to absorb and retain information? After all, why remember anything when you can just look up information again if needed? And is that a concern?

Does Internet use affect the depth of research we do? Do we become accustomed to skimming headings and and scanning short text passages? Is that sufficient to acquire a real understanding of a research topic?

What about the way we think? If we don’t absorb and retain a lot of information in the first place, how do we connect new information with other information and build on it?

In The Open Road, Matt Asay blogged about Carr’s article also. He quotes Carr,

“As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”–the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities–we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.“

Asay then writes,

“ “Excellent!” you say, “Now I’ll be able to retrieve an infinite amount of information, like Google.” Maybe. Or maybe our ability to retain and process information will continue to dwindle. Remember books? Those were the things we read before e-mail, Web browsing, and Twitter came on the scene.

Speaking of Twitter, am I the only one who views it as further evidence of a soundbite culture that struggles even to think beyond 140-character blips?

We really don’t want to think like Google. We don’t want to speak like Twitter. We don’t want to converse like e-mail. And yet we increasingly do, as the Internet reshapes the world in its image.“

It’s something to think about…if we still can, that is.

Read (or skim) more reactions to Carr’s article in his own blog, Rough Type.

You may also be interested in Carr’s 2008 book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google. You can read a blog review of it on The Open Road. It’s on order for UWW’s Library, and also available from other UW libraries. UWW students and staff can request it through the free Universal Borrowing service.

Want to keep up with the goings-on in the City of Whitewater this summer? There are a couple of online options:

• Whitewater Banner
• Free Whitewater

And of course, you’ll want to keep reading the University Library blog! At the bottom of every entry you can click on “Entries Feed” to have new blog entries sent to you.

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!

The site, less than 10 years old, recently added its 1,500th paper. Topics of recent articles include: Chimpanzee Autarky (Do chimps barter?) and Human and Chimpanzee Gene Expression Differences Replicated in Mice Fed Different Diets (Do mice eating different diets–human cafeteria food, McDonald’s fast food, mouse pellets, or lab chimp food–exhibit different gene expression?).

Recent blog topics include No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (or Gift or Sample), referring to the PLoS Medicine journal item The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States which argues that “the staggering amounts spent by drug companies on marketing” are not justified by their innovation in drug development, and Broiler Chicken Welfare Definitely Isn’t Pukka which discusses concerns about broiler chickens and the conditions in which they are raised.

PLoS encourages researchers to publish in its open access journals for maximum impact (since the articles are freely available all over the world), but there is a cost. UW-Madison is an institutional member of PLoS (see articles UW-Madison researchers have submitted since 2005).