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...

PLN

Paul Newman's last laps, here

things change

Nato today said it had received a note from Russia saying it would break off military cooperation with the west's military alliance, in ...

50 50

Mr Fabulous in PNG the full baby-named-after-Kevin-Rudd/hermaphroditic goat/carjacking story here

abeetz

The blogger formerly known as Mithridates, formerly resident in Brooklyn, toughs it out in the culinary desert that is Chicago and describes...

regrets, I've had a few

Anatol Stefanowitsch at Bremer Sprachblog takes another look at a classic xkcd (pop-up: And nothing for I'm glad I saw 'Epic Movie...

another helpful copyeditor

Lev Raphael talks about creative difference here

on not wanting to talk about it

From Andrew Sullivan , link to Mike Crowley's account of how Mark Salter was Aaron to McCain's Moses, here

Sigur Ros

I went over to Yorckschlosschen the other day and ran into TAR ART RAT who was there with a friend. They were going later to a concert by S...

brand wars

A couple of months ago, or probably more, I cadged a copy of Sathnam Sanghera's If You Don't Know Me By Now off Penguin, claiming th...

lost in transmission

Wyatt Mason discusses Michael A. Lofaro's edition of James Agee's A Death in the Family, published after JA's death by editor/p...

mechanical man

Children seemed to love it but teachers were "less inclined" to allow the robot to take the whole class. ... Sue Palmer, author of...

P**P*l

A couple of readers have tried to buy Your Name Here and been sent back to the blog rather than to the download page. Other readers say the...

borderliner

TAR ART RAT describes ordeal at hands of Polish police for reckless drunken stationary use of a bicycle, here .

Housman thou shouldst be living at this hour

ATHENA Yes, Odysseus, I watched the progress of your hunt with some interest. Fragment of Sophocles' Ajax as translated by John Tipton...

more R

Have just found a new online introduction to R, Quick-R , which looks terrific. I have stacks of print-outs of R documentation littering th...

authenticity

The actors tie their own ties a lot of the time, and it makes a big difference.” Weiner on Mad Men at the NYT