Camus wins Nobel prize

Le président du comité émet son avis : on attendait du nouveau dans la manière d'Hemingway, et "c'est arrivé avec Le Vieil Homm...

The Beast

The last post was No. 666. Dan Visel has just written to say that our interview is now online on Future of the Book . FOTB has a spectacula...

assessment exercise

The 2008 university Research Assessment Exercise ( RAE ), whose results have been announced with a mixture of fear, loathing and exhaustion...

whitelist

1. Roz Tritton. Best Dentist in the World. 2. Julien Kwan. Best Apple Service Provider in the World. 3. Ed Park. Best Editor in the World. 4...

rerererealism

Great extended quotation from Jonathan Culler on Edmond Caldwell's Contra James Wood, here . Culler's comments are also pertinent to...

always the last to know

I have a feeling everyone else already knows about CapitalOne. No one else would have been stupid enough to sign up for a credit card with ...

äääääähm

In a café with a Hotspot that supposedly closes at 5. It's 3am. Someone is going around putting chairs upside down on tables. How this h...

For one thing, it worked

Owen Hatherley of Nastybrutalistandshort on Shirley Porter, Tesco heiress, gerrymanderer, Kissinger manquee, here . Realising that Labour...

tulips, art, bubbles

Modern Missives on tulips and art and markets, here . In the winter of 1636-37, ownership of tulips bulbs sometimes changed hands up to 10 t...

Arabic dictionary

A reader contacted me recently in connection with the mooted list of Top 1000 Words in Literary and Philosophical Arabic. Those who have tac...

over there

Came across a fabulous blog, Humor Vagabundo, written by Luis Moreno Villamediana, a Venezuelan poet; here's part of his description of ...

man is the measure

Came across a post on Infinite Thought on, or rather quoting from and referring to Massimo de Angelis' and David Harvie's paper on ...

the trouble with informants

My friend Ingrid is in Berlin. We were going to go to Badeschiff, a swimming pool-cum-sauna floating in the Spree, but she had to see her do...

Books of the Year

Garth Hallberg of The Millions invited me to write about best books I'd read this year. He has just posted the result, here .

definite descriptions and such

I was having another look at Gerhard Antretter's Deutsch zu Zweit, and decided to see what he had to say about articles. The index gave...

new game new game new game

Language Hat quotes Remy de Gourmont in a post on The Writer's Capital Crime : Conformism, imitativeness, submission to rules and to tea...

Lexique Pro

I sent an e-mail to Languagehat asking advice on elicitation for a book I was writing. LH passed the e-mail on to Claire Bowern of Yale, who...

long days

Went to an amazing event in TARARTRAT 's apartment last night. Vattenfall has cut off the electricity so it was lit with 200 candles. A...

intercostal clavicle

My mother is visiting Berlin. I've been preparing my apartment to sublet. Much running about. The second day of my mother's visit I...

when is a hand-out not a hand-out

Currently waging a war against administration as the University have decided to ban students from accessing online resources until their fee...

silence

Before calling Luc, Pierre and I had talked about the place of silence, and more generally the question of time, in interviews and in their ...

Lachmann Research Fellowship at LSE

Came across this Research Fellowship at the LSE website - I'm posting it in case it's relevant to any readers who for one reason o...

Caderno de Saramago

Mithridates has just sent me an e-mail. Saramago has a blog . (It's available in Spanish as well as Portuguese; hope that means most r...

trilingualism

David Crystal on trilingualism in children. Three is an age where monolingual children first display serious 'normal non-fluency' (...

iterated polarisation games

[published this earlier, then wanted to think some more and put it in the drafts folder, got some e-mails from readers so I am posting again...

all change

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve and Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs tycoon who became US Treasury secretary, have done mor...

fiddling while Rome...

It feels peculiar posting anything at all, why bother to link when everyone can go straight to the sources themselves, why bother to say any...

that is not what I meant, at all

came across some videos of Douglas Adams on YouTube, including one in which Stephen Fry talks about his Wodehousian humour, then reads out ...

oblivion

DFW lies in the arms of sleep's cousin. I think suddenly of the work of David Lewis on modal realism. My friend Peter King summarises: ...

appalled

Over on Political Arithmetik , a post from August on age and voter turn-out. In 2004 those 18-29 were 21.8% of the population, while those 5...

against mimesis

All the reviews I’ve seen have mentioned Pierce Brosnan’s terrible singing, but I haven’t seen much criticism of Meryl Streep’s performance...

LRB

Jenny Turner has written a review of Your Name Here for the LRB, here .

chartjunk of the day

Andrew Gelman comments on a flagrant example of chartjunk over on The Monkey Cage .

in our thoughts lately

An old Language Log post (re the great gay sheep "story") had this great quotation from Harry Frankfurt's Bullshit : What ...

Aloha no!

TAR ART RAT talks back to our next Prez. (Luckily I was not on this mailing list.)

Bloggrrrrrrrrr

Back in the dawn of time a young writer started a blog under the pseudonym Mithridates. I actually know who he is (we had already exchanged ...

big girl's blouse

(thinking of writing apologetic e-mail re still unfinished review, along the lines of 'sorry to be such a big girl's blouse', I ...

how did we get here from there?

A lthough Albert Camus died before baby boomers took charge of the world and placed their redoubtable imprimatur on the political scene, he ...

Softer World 2

The Softer World interview is now online here . We talk about suicide, languages, games, a few other things.

don't look now

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception. Walter Benjamin on writing, from Marginal Revolution

softer world interview

Joey Comeau of A Softer World s ent me some interview questions a while back, which I finally got round to answering. I think he is going t...

post-Socratics

A few days ago Wyatt Mason posted a letter from Malcolm Lowry to Andre Barzun objecting to what he saw as an unfair review. This was the th...