Why would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony. 

Those of you who don’t have perfect children will find this familiar: Just as I was withdrawing money in a bank lobby, my 5-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of elderly ladies looked on in disgust. (Their children, apparently, had been perfect.) I gave Dorothy a disappointed look and said, “That argument won’t work, sweetheart. It isn’t pathetic enough.” 

She blinked a couple of times and picked herself up off the floor, pouting but quiet. 

“What did you say to her?” one of the women asked. 

I explained that “pathetic” was a term used in rhetoric, the ancient art of argument. I had happened across the subject one rainy day in a library and become instantly obsessed. As a result Dorothy had learned almost from birth that a good persuader doesn’t merely express her own emotions; she manipulates her audience. Me, in other words. 

Under my tutelage in the years that followed, Dorothy and her younger brother, George, became keenly, even alarmingly, persuasive. “Well, whatever it was,” the woman said, “it certainly worked.” Sure it did. I’ve worked hard at making my kids good at arguing. Absolutely. 

Why on earth would any parent want that? Because persuasion is powerful. Rhetoric originated in the lawsuits of ancient Greece, when citizens who weren’t good at persuading could lose their houses — or their lives. It was a staple of education until the early 1800s, teaching society’s elite how to debate, make public decisions, and reach consensus. It probably explains how the founding fathers managed to carve a nation out of 13 squabbling colonies. 

And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view. 

I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it. 

George, who took longer than Dorothy did to talk, was at first a devotee of what rhetoricians call argument by the stick. After every fight I’d ask him, “Did you get the other kid to agree with you?” For years he considered that a thoroughly stupid question, and maybe it was. But eventually this question made sense to him: In the world of rhetoric, argument by the stick is no argument. It never persuades, it only inspires revenge. To disagree reasonably, a child must learn the three basic tools of argument. I got them straight from Aristotle, hence the Greek labels: logos, ethos, and pathos. 

Arguing isn’t fighting, and fighting isn’t arguing.

Urban agriculture is producing a lot more than food.

…The second green revolution is an attempt to undo the destructive aspects of the first one, to make an organic and intimate agriculture that feeds minds and hearts as well as bodies, that measures intangible qualities as well as quantity. By volume, it produces only a small percentage of this country’s food, but of course its logic isn’t merely volume. The first green revolution may have increased yield in many cases, but it also increased alienation and toxicity, and it was efficient only if you ignored its fossil fuel dependency, carbon output, and other environmental impacts. It was an industrial revolution for agriculture, and what might be happening now is distinctly postindustrial, suspicious of the big and the corporate, interested in the old ways and the alternatives. This is more than a production project; it’s a reconnection project, which is why it is also an urban one—if we should all be connected to food production, food production should happen everywhere, urban and rural and every topsoil-laden crevice and traffic island in between. 

Today, major urban agriculture projects are firmly rooted in Burlington, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and dozens of other American cities. Sales of vegetable seeds have skyrocketed across the country. Backyard chickens have become a new norm, and schoolyard gardens have sprung up across the nation and beyond since Alice Waters began Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard Project almost two decades ago. Organic farms and farmers’ markets have proliferated, and for the first time in many decades the number of farmers is going up instead of down. Though those things can be counted, the transformation of awareness that both produces and is produced by all these things is incalculable.

We think more about food, know more about food, care more about food than we did twenty or thirty years ago. Food has become both an upscale fetish (those menus that overinform you about what farm your heirloom ham or parsnips came from) and a poor people’s radical agenda, a transformation of the most intimate everyday practices that cuts across class—though it has yet to include all of us. In 1969, the Black Panthers ran breakfast programs to feed hungry inner-city children, and those children—or rather the children and grandchildren of those children—are still hungry, and the inner city is still a food desert: a place where access to decent food, or even to food, is not a given. But farming has come to the ’hood. And everywhere else.

When I go to colleges like Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, which has a food garden project on campus, I sometimes find myself telling the students that baby boomers in their youth famously had sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, but the young now have gardens. Gardens are where they locate their idealism, their hope for a better world, and, more than hope, their realization of it on the small scale of a few dozen rows of corn and tomatoes and kale. Thought of just as means of producing food, the achievements of urban agriculture may be modest, but as means of producing understanding, community, social transformation, and catalytic action, they may be the opposite. When they’re at their best, urban farms and gardens are a way to change the world. Even if they only produced food—it’s food. And even keeping the model and knowledge of agriculture alive may become crucial to our survival at some later point. 

Many assume that balance is a key element of good journalism. Fresh-faced journalism students often arrive with the dewy-eyed aims of pursuing the truth and preserving balance and objectivity. Objectivity is easy to dismiss. It just doesn’t exist. There, I’ve said it. But balance is a trickier beast. Balance can be a great asset in an article. It can also be ruinous.

The problem of balance is neatly explained by a British hack, Nick Davies, who wrote a seminal (and underrated) book on falsehood, distortion and propaganda in journalism called “Flat Earth News”. Mr Davies does a bit of teaching, and he has his students imagine that they are asked to write a report on what the weather will be like tomorrow. They interview a woman in one room who says it will be sunny. Then they interview a man in another room who says it’s going to rain. Your job, as a journalist, is not to simply write up what you have been told, he says. Your job is to look out the window.

Writing a “balanced” version of this story would produce an article that reads “he says it will rain” but “she says it won’t”. You have all these quotes fluttering around like “butterflies in a jar”, going nowhere. But there is a bigger danger lurking. What if the man who says it is going to rain is lying? What if he is an umbrella salesman? Your options are to either make a judgment about the truth, or print what you have been told. But if you balance an article when you know that all the evidence points to a sunny day tomorrow, then you are participating in a denial of truth.

It should be obvious that this made-up scenario has parallels in climate-change reporting, an area of journalism that has been dogged by the issue of balance. When climate-change sceptics felt that reporters were writing about the issue as if it were accepted fact, they pushed hard to create a sufficiently large body of “experts” and “evidence” in order to force journalists to take cover under the trusty shield of balance. A controversy was created, where none had existed, by those who stood to gain. And thus journalists felt obliged to give equal weight to both sides of the debate.

Today, creating uncertainty in order to hijack the concept of balance is a significant industry. Public-relations firms create artificial “grass roots” organisations for business and political-interest groups in order to have their views reflected in the media. They are known as “astroturf” groups, a concept that might not even exist if not for the demand for so much balance. For a recent example, see this brilliant series in theChicago Tribune describing how the chemical industry created a phony consumer watchdog group to successfully push for the greater use of flame retardants. (Some have even suggested that the tea party is an astroturf movement.)

Why are journalists susceptible to these tactics? Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, suggests that political journalists aim to look high-minded by making both sides look bad. I think the motivations are far more trivial. Balance is easy and cheap. In political journalism, a vitriolic quote from each side and a punchy headline is all that is needed to feed the news machine. Who cares if substance and analysis are thrown to the wind? Journalism is a commodity. There is always a need for more “inventory” on which to place ads. Journalism, real journalism—the pursuit of truth—also creates inventory, but not as much, and it is difficult, costly and time-consuming. Far easier to bolt together a few pieces of trivial comment from political pundits and move on.

Don’t deny the change. Direct it wisely.

Soon most if not all libraries will be facing quandaries similar to that of the NYPL, owing to the devices on which more and more people are doing more and more of their reading. Already at least a fifth of all book sales come from e-books, and the numbers are rising fast. Total e-book sales in January 2012 came in close to twice those of a year previously, and were more than ten times the figure for January 2009. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 21 percent of all Americans have read an e-book in the past year, with the proportion predictably higher among the young. Nearly all of the most popular English-language titles are downloadable, including millions of free books in the public domain, mostly digitized by Google Books. Amazon and Barnes & Noble sell hundreds of thousands of copyrighted titles for a price similar to or lower than that of the equivalent paperback. When the Harry Potter novels finally appeared in electronic versions this spring, they racked up $1.5 million in sales in just three days.

This technology cannot simply substitute for the great libraries of the present. After all, libraries are not just repositories of books. They are communities, sources of expertise, and homes to lovingly compiled collections that amount to far more than the sum of their individual printed parts. Their physical spaces, especially in grand temples of learning like the NYPL, subtly influence the way that reading and writing takes place in them. And yet it is foolish to think that libraries can remain the same with the new technology on the scene.

Let me pose a question that will itself strike some readers as a sign of severe cultural decline: why should most libraries still own physical copies of out-of-copyright books—that is to say, for the most part, books printed before 1923? Yes, millions of Americans, mostly poor, still lack Internet access. (According to the U.S. Census, in 2009 somewhat over thirty percent of households did not have a home Internet connection.) Millions of others, mostly older, do not know how to download books, and millions more feel uncomfortable reading on a screen, as opposed to paper. But all these obstacles will largely disappear within twenty or thirty years.

Already 90 percent of Americans live in households with at least one cell phone, and within a few years we can expect all cell phones to have internet access. The knowledge of how to download and to manipulate basic files has already become a necessity for most working Americans. As for “screen reading,” not only does comfort with the practice depend heavily on age, but the quality of screens will continue to improve. Remember that the first commercial e-readers came out in the United States less than six years ago, and the devices’ technical quality, as represented by the newest Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, has already improved radically in that short space of time, while prices have fallen dramatically. It is not at all unreasonable to suppose that in another couple of decades cheap and ubiquitous reading devices will have screens that look, to all intents and purposes, identical to paper. Already this May a New York Times tech columnist, reviewing the new generation of devices, quipped that “in some ways, the only reason to stick with dead tree books these days is nostalgia”—today’s hyperbole, tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

Specialized scholars will always have reasons to consult the original paper copies of books. Marginalia, watermarks, paper quality, binding, and many other features of the physical book that digitization cannot always capture offer valuable clues about how the books were produced, circulated, and read, how they created meaning. But this sort of research mostly takes place in a small handful of leading research libraries, and it involves a small number of readers. Far more readers, of course, appreciate physical books for their aesthetic qualities: the feel of the paper, the crisp look of print on the page, the elegant binding, the pleasant heft of the volume in the hand, the sense of history embedded in a venerable edition that has gone through many owners. But this sort of pleasure, real and meaningful as it is, is harder to justify financially, as resources grow increasingly scarce.

Some critics warn that digital media are more fragile than paper, and fear that as digital formats evolve, older files will become unreadable. These fears, too, are misplaced. Yes, digital media are fragile, but they are also far easier to duplicate than paper. The history of the Computer Age has been the history of exponentially more efficient digital storage capacity. In the mid-1950s, an early IBM hard drive stored 3.75 megabytes of data—roughly the amount now required to digitize a short book—in a cabinet that measured five feet by five feet eight inches by two feet, and weighed hundreds of pounds. Today the most advanced, commercially-available “secure digital” cards can store 500,000 times as much data in a package that measures 32 by 24 by 2.1 millimeters. Which is to say, a digital copy of the entire book collection of the Library of Congress—some thirty-three million volumes—can easily fit into a small shoebox, making it simple to produce thousands of backup digital copies of every book ever printed. As for format, the very existence of vast quantities of useful information encoded in particular formats makes backward compatibility a necessity, and guards against the danger of obsolescence. Internet browsers today can still read nearly every Web page ever created. Current versions of Microsoft Word can read Word files from the 1980s. Nearly all PDFs ever created remain readable in Adobe Acrobat and scores of competing programs.

Given these facts, it will inevitably become harder and harder for most libraries to justify keeping physical copies of digitized public domain books on their shelves. The books take up space. They must be kept at a proper temperature. The process of checking them out, checking them in, and re-shelving them involves human labor. All of these things incur significant expenses, at a time when most library budgets are shrinking. At present, a large constituency still prefers paper books to e-books. When this constituency vanishes, as it most likely will within two or three decades, the arguments for eliminating the physical objects will come to seem far more pressing, particularly for smaller libraries whose patrons make relatively little use of older books. Less than twenty years ago Nicholson Baker could lament, in an eloquent New Yorker article, the disappearance of physical card catalogues from libraries. (Among other things, he criticized electronic catalogues for their “neolithic screen displays and excruciatingly slow retrieval times,” as if the technology would never improve.) But how many readers are still troubled, in any serious way, by the disappearance of those old catalogues? (Recently the Yale University library unceremoniously junked its old card catalogue drawers, filling a large dumpster with them.) How many will be troubled, twenty years hence, by the disappearance of the physical books?