But how do our browsers and the web actually work? How has the World Wide Web evolved into what we know and love today? And what do we need to know to navigate the web safely and efficiently? 0 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web” is a short guide for anyone who’s curious about the basics of browsers and the web. Here’s what you’ll find here:

irst we’ll look at the Internet, the very backbone that allows the web to exist. We’ll also take a look at how the web is used today, through cloud computing and web apps.

hen, we’ll introduce the building blocks of web pages like HTML and JavaScript, and review how their invention and evolution have changed the websites you visit every day. We’ll also take a look at the modern browser and how it helps users browse the web more safely and securely.

inally, we’ll look ahead to the exciting innovations in browsers and web technologies that we believe will give us all even faster and more immersive online experiences in the future.

via 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.

Rowan Williams believes an illuminating new survey of Christianity will have few, if any, rivals.  From his' review of "A History of Christianity" by Diarmaid MacCulloch:

This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader. It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language. The story is told with unobtrusive stylishness as well as clarity. And at a time when Christianity's profile in our culture is neither as positive nor as extensive as it has been, this book is crucial testimony to the resilience of the Christian community in a remarkable diversity of social settings. The first three thousand years do not seem likely to be also the last.

via The Guardian.

'You have to choose your future regrets' In June Christopher Hitchens, the hard-drinking polemicist and atheist, met his toughest opponent yet when he was diagnosed with cancer. The question on many lips was: would his illness alter his beliefs – on Iraq, on Islam, on God? At home in Washington, with a large glass of Johnnie Walker to hand, he responds with characteristic combativeness

via The Observer.

Despite the steady paycheck, it wasn’t easy being a sideman for pianist-composer Thelonious Monk during his legendary late ’50s residency at Greenwich Village’s Five Spot, the “house that Monk built.” Johnny Griffin, who held down the tenor saxophone in 1958, recalled:

[Monk] wouldn’t pull his music out, and the joint would be loaded, every night. He had it in his briefcase, but he said it would be better if I heard it. So he would play the melody and I’m supposed to retain the melody after he played the first chorus, and I was supposed to play the second chorus coming in with the melody! So you can imagine what happened. I’d mess up, and he’d say ‘No, no, no, let’s do it again.’

The perversity in evidence here—why bring a briefcase full of music and then never open it? Why compose songs of such complexity, sweat every harmonic and rhythmic detail, and then refuse to allow your sidemen to study them?—was pure Monk. In his music and his personal life, he pushed situations to their limits.

Sometimes the aesthetic gamble paid great dividends, as at the Five Spot, where the audience of painters, Beats, and other postwar bohemians welcomed the intimate seat at Monk’s open rehearsal. The very messiness of Monk’s method was proof to them of his adventurousness and even his virtue. When Monk’s band transformed from a disjointed ensemble into a swinging unit, alive to the offbeat accents and melodic surprises that were Monkian signatures, audiences witnessed something that was, to their worldly sensibility, better than a miracle—better because it was not just astonishing but believable too. The evidence was before their ears.

And then there was the downside of the Monkian gamble, often felt keenly by those closest to him. John Coltrane, Monk’s most famous collaborator during his Five Spot residency, recalled that playing with Monk was “like falling down an elevator shaft.” One misstep, one lost measure, and you were flailing with no help on the way. And when Monk wasn’t letting his sidemen flounder, he was leading them with an insistence that sometimes felt too fierce. “[Monk’s] comping was so strong [when he was] playing his own music,” Griffin noted, “that it’s almost like you’re in a padded cell.”

via Boston Review — Scott Saul: Off Minor.

IMAGINE FOR A moment that a rich, innovative company is looking to draft the best and brightest high-school grads from across the globe without regard to geography. Let’s say this company’s recruiter has a round-the-world plane ticket and just a few weeks to scout for talent. Where should he go? Our hypothetical recruiter knows there’s little sense in judging a nation like the United States by comparing it to, say, Finland. This is a big country, after all, and school quality varies dramatically from state to state. What he really wants to know is, should he visit Finland or Florida? Korea or Connecticut? Uruguay or Utah?

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place—the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future—using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.

We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?

Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students—by this measure at least—might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.

via The Atlantic.

There’s something about Jonathan Safran Foer that drives a certain breed of dyspeptic New York writer/blogger to drink—more so than usual, anyway. They chafe at the six-figure advances, the visiting professor gigs at Yale and NYU, the majestic Park Slope brownstone. There’s even a catchphrase for it—Schadenfoer! However, those hoping for a colossal career misstep might want to pour another highball, because his latest book, Tree of Codes, is a quietly stunning work of art. The first major title by new London-based publisher Visual Editions, Tree of Codes was created by slicing out chunks of text from Foer’s favorite novel, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish author Bruno Schulz. The result is a spare, haunting story that appears to hang in negative space on the page. Pretentious? Possibly. But it is also very, very cool. VF Daily spoke with Safran Foer about his delightfully tactile new book.

Heather Wagner: Tell me about Tree of Codes: how did the idea of cutting out words from an existing novel come to you?

Jonathan Safran Foer: A couple of things: One is the book The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. It’s a book I’ve always loved. Some things you love passively, some you love actively. In this case, I felt the compulsion to do something with it. Then I started thinking about what books look like, what they will look like, how the form of the book is changing very quickly. If we don’t give it a lot of thought, it won’t be for the better. There is an alternative to e-books. And I just love the physicality of books. I love breaking the spine, smelling the pages, taking it into the bath. . .

What inspired the design?

I thought: What if you pushed it to the extreme, and created something not old-fashioned or nostalgic but just beautiful? It helps you remember that life can surprise you.

via Vanity Fair.