the cavorting pig

Infinite Thought is in San Francisco. Checks out some socialist realism, quotes: 'No nation has ever treated the pig as cruelly, as bar...

wikiwonderland

A brief history of wikis, with an interview of Jimmy Wales (a founder of Wikipedia) and Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki), by Mike Rogo...

you don't need a diploma, you need a work ethic

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution on education and signaling, here If education is pure signaling, just give everyone a standardized test i...

hatherley on godard

It's long been my suspicion that when people say they don't like Brecht, and Brechtian techniques, what they really mean is they...

logistical Berlin

I went to Robben & Wientjes to rent a van for the Schlafsofa. The girl at the desk asks: Are you Canadian? (I am speaking in German.) ...

Pardon me, my name is Stimson

The dollar has gone into freefall. An editor has offered to publish Your Name Here, explaining that he loves Joyce, Beckett and Pynchon and ...

flabbergasted

Mark Liberman has chosen Wiggins' The Shadow Catcher over Tom McCarthy's Remainder in the Tournament of Books . Readers of this blog...

Big Brother Wants You

For those who think they might like to work for a media giant, Bertelsmann has a wide range of openings posted on the Create Your Own Career...

great expectations

Accounting techniques like budgeting, sales projections and financial reporting are supposed to help prevent business failures by giving man...

from gridlock to green machines

At Daily EM (which got it from Core77 ), a poster from the Muenster planning department shows the amount of space required to transport th...

Chomsky & Foucault

Adam Smith overboard in Economist balloon debate

In an age where you need to be numerate to do almost anything else (from building bridges to conquering disease), governments anxiously comp...

exotica

Bill Poser has a helpful post on Language Log on entering exotic characters in blogs.

stadt aus glas

Went to the newsagent to buy the Weekend FT to see what it had to say about the mortgage rescue talks. Saw this on a shelf: It has an introd...

diy

How to design your own notebook using Lulu, on booktwo , courtesy Lowebrow .

a simple businessman

Just before he is released on June 23rd, if all goes to plan, Mr Amaya will graduate from the Prison Entrepreneurship Programme (PEP), a rem...

why bosses are bad for you

Paul Graham on why You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because...

the art of getting it wrong

While Stefan Sagmeister is more circumspect about the productive role of failure, his anecdote about one such moment is hilarious. A few ye...

lies, damned lies and misconceptions

A reader at Columbia raised the question, what kind of novelist would be interested in statistics. Calvino once described a city in which a ...

neurotica

My somewhat dour contribution to the Morning News Tournament of Books is up today.

fudging

But how can you tell if the research literature on a given subject has been rigged? It’s a tricky problem, because you’re chasing evidence f...

porno vs porneia explained

It's almost certain that on its current precedents, the U.S. Supreme Court would hold that garden-variety pornographic actors are indeed...

play safe, go vegetarian

If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota o...

who will buy

Andrew Sullivan pointed out that it is legal to pay two people to have sex and film them and sell the film; it just isn't legal to pay ...

evidence

John Carey reviews Julian Barnes' recent memoir, repeats without demur Barnes' account of Stendhal's response to seeing paintin...

curiouser and curiouser

Thanks to Jenny Davidson's Light Reading , I have just read Julian Barnes' review of the latest volume Flaubert's correspondenc...

Respect

In February, some 18 months after its launch in September 2006, Strange Maps had clocked up 5,000,000 hits. What makes it so irresistible? ...

money trail

Justin Wolfers on Freakonomics on Eliot Spitzer's integrity as Attorney General (Is Virtue What We Buy or What We Sell?), summarising wo...

a superb work of scholarship which no home should be without

If you are anxious for the success of your son in life, for the correctness of his conduct and the soundness of his principles, keep him to ...

plagiarism beckons

Here you will find the online presence of Owen Hathaway. Well, I was looking for a blog I came across the other day, Sit Down Man, You'r...

Ibn Khaldun

The goal of human society, ibn Khaldun thought, was the development of culture and the sciences. For the arts and sciences to become develop...

wha-?

Over on the Morning News , Elizabeth Kiem dashes my hopes of getting a free copy of The Savage Detectives.

scary

Maud Newton on having her blog deleted by pharmahacks.

Frankly, my dear

I have a piece in the current issue of The Believer . I originally volunteered to write a piece about Sergio Leone but ended up sending some...

Telegraph obits

The Telegraph obituary of Paul Raymond, London's King of Porn, in its own inimitable style... The current revival of Soho had little to ...

a dismal scientist tells some

OK, this is just like the way you analyze sterilized intervention in currencies. And the usual problem with such intervention applies: the f...

mith antagonizes

I thought: I need to start buying cool art magazines so I look more attractive to people on trains. I thought: But 7 pounds? That's roug...

any fan of Dr Seuss...

Kevin Drum wonders why Clinton and Obama supporters get so worked up at each other. Any fan of Dr. Seuss will know that policy similarity h...

They're off...

The Rooster Tournament of Books has officially begun, with Tobias Seamon judging the first match.

China Babel

YouKu 优酷 is a good example of what may be called "Sino-English," which I predict will become increasingly evident in the years to ...

Existentialism for beginners

A literary agent in San Francisco has written a post on why it takes so long to get a novel published, at the end of which he says: You have...

Someone is WRONG

Mithridates on Fredric Jameson on pornography, The Godfather, Jaws, how much time have you got? (And this is just Part I)

trying to cut down

when I referred to Socrates I meant, of course, St Paul...

The Morning News has sent me a chart of the play-offs for the Rooster. As it turns out, Remainder is up against On Chesil Beach, not The Sa...

Issues

Went to my German class y'day and realised I had made a terrible mistake. The class was discussing the book it had been reading for the ...

Bong Jaw

The English examination boards have decided that modern language A-levels should no longer include the study of literary texts - students wi...

bangs and whimpers

My language school kindly agreed to let me postpone my February language course to March. I had written to my teacher saying I would like to...

rooster

Several months ago I agreed to be a judge in the Rooster , a literary competition on the Morning News. The competition is set up as a knock...