How Google Rediscovered the 19th Century

When we read the past, we acknowledge that we stand not only, as Isaac Newton put it, on the shoulders of giants, but also on those of scholars of smaller stature who were no less passionate about their subjects and determined in their own way to contribute to the intellectual conversation. The 12th-century philosopher and educator Bernard of Chartres is said to have observed that we are all dwarfs when we attempt to climb atop gargantuan flesh. I am glad to have met more of them online, and to have profited from their vantage point.