"Google is reading my mind—or trying to."

If all goes according to the current plan, two books from my pile of recent acquisitions -- Mitali Perkins' Bamboo People and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows (another related entry here) -- will fill the hours following our early-morning bike rides this weekend. So naturally, Carr's short piece in the July/August issue of The Atlantic attracted my attention.

From "Googlethink":

I like Google—it’s a cuddly company, and endlessly helpful—but I also resent it. It’s like a nosy mother, intent on knowing everything her children are doing and thinking. Worse, it’s like a meddlesome mother, the kind who can’t let her kids do anything on their own. Start typing a keyword, and she immediately butts in, trying to finish it for you. At first you enjoy the hyperactive solicitousness. But then you begin to bridle. You’re being smothered.

An aside: Toward the end of the piece, Carr quotes Matthew Crawford. Crawford, you may recall, is the wide-and-far-ranging mind behind Shop Class as Soulcraft, a book that grew from an essay of the same title, first published in The New Atlantis four years ago. (Related M-mv entry here.) Pushing the mind's pencil from one mental dot to the next -- Synthesis! Serendipity! Synchronicity! -- I was struck afresh by the connections the reading life affords.