But I've been there too. Really!
The article by Steven Levy is from the "April 18 issue". That's all
that the Newsweek site tells us. In order to find what year we're dealing with
I had to do a bit of searching - or more to the point, run a Google search on
the title of the Levy article that brought me to blogs that referred to it. In
that way I was able to learn (as I'd anyway guessed) that it was from 2005.
But though I may not be "using" Levy's reference to "being it",
I do use something else he mentions. Levy opens his piece with the line:
Melvil Dewey had it easy.
In one of my lectures that's seen quite a bit of use over at least the last five
years I devote a few minutes to discussing Melvil Dewey and his decimal system,
explaining that 130 years ago it was still possible to compartmentalize human
knowledge into rather clear categories, such that Dewey's system both made sense
and was useful. Today, however, areas of study overlap to such a great extent
that Dewey's system, probably more of an art than a science from the beginning,
has become exceedingly arbitrary. And now I discover that an authority like Steven
Levy says pretty much the same thing. How will I convince people that I got there
on my own (or at least as much as is possible on my own)?
Go to: The page about the title, or
Go to: A vague concept waiting to materialize, or
Go to: But you can, you can!