Week 6

session notes

Visitor: Jérémie Lumbroso, Princeton Computer Science (1:30–2:30)

Note: Election Day is a month away. Are you all set up to vote? Please see Princeton’s Vote100 Project.

Note: this is the University’s midterm examination week.

Before Class

• David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (2007). Introduction and Chapter 4.

• “The Revolutionary Post”, interview with Winifred Gallagher on 99% Invisible (22:55)

• No response questions for this week. Focus on the practicum instead!

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Practicum

Download and analyze all the text messages on your phone.

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Related Links

artifact of the week: Cicero’s letters

• Mary Beard, “Ciceronian Correspondences: Making a Book out of Letters.” In Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (2006)
• Hannah Čulík-Baird, “Looking at Ciceronian papyri in the John Rylands”, o pietas animi [blog post]

history of the postal system

• Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: A History (2016)
• John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox (2011)

21st century

• on last mile logistics
• on post 9/11 securitization of the postal system
• on COVID and mail-in ballots: “Is the Mail Getting Slower? We’re Tracking It.” New York Times, Sep 14, 2020