Caleb Crain. The Wreck of the Henry Clay. Self-published. May 2009.

On December 7th, 2006, in a blog entry on "Offprints in the Digital Age," honestly reprinted in its entirety, n+1 friend and frequent contributor Caleb Crain assured his readers, "not even I am so nineteenth-century as to have my essays privately printed." But he has now gone and done just that! Not just his essays but the blog itself, "Steamboats Are Ruining Everything." By doing so, he offers a Quixotic and dandified challenge, a well-mannered provocation to a legion of conventional wisdoms about what I now sadly must call something like "word culture." Why turn your blog back into a printed book when the whole point of blogging and reading blogs was thought to lead to an inexorable emancipation from the bindings of the page, the severe duties of print?

Although that question is never addressed directly, an answer of sorts emerges over 400 pages, spanning six years of blog posts. Hardly a member of the dreaded MSM when he began blogging, Crain was nonetheless an established and highly-regarded freelance journalist for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Nation, a former editor of Lingua Franca, the review of academic life that ceased publication in 2001, and a scholar of 19th century American history and literature. Crain tells us that he started the blog after being offered free software and web-hosting in a trial for Harvard alumni. (It's worth noting how "new media" forms were deliberately marketed via such perks to those positioned to drive change from the top. As we've seen with the Kindle. More recently, Jeff Bezos gifted the device to book publishers and literary agents, thereby enlisting them as footsoldiers in the liquidation—er, future—of their own trade.) In his introduction, Crain admits to diverse motives, some vaguely professional—posting corrections and addenda to published pieces, trying to identify an audience or community of readers who might like his work but not have time to track him through all the various publications he writes for. He is forthright about the fact that he had no need to "break in" to the old media establishment, nor did he imagine he was breaking it down. Read More

"Right now, terrorists are trying to kill me.
My wife and family are faraway,
and the people I work with are idiots.
My name is SFC John H.
I am a US Soldier.
This has been the longest year of my life."
—from the blog John of Arabia

Never have soldiers in a war been equipped with so much personal technology. It's not just backpack missiles. "You literally can't go 30 seconds without hearing a Kylie Minogue tune or Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor emanating from someone's pocket," grumbled journalist Kevin Sites in his blog. Sites would later videotape a U.S. Marine killing an unarmed man in a mosque, provoking international controversy, but that day in Kuwait, still waiting to cross the border, the image that stayed with him was the glow of laptops, temporarily left alone by their users: "One by one, the ghostly images of wives, children, girlfriends, husbands, pets, slowly appear[ed] from the depths of cyberspace—as screensavers." Read More