open paprika

A bad year ends. A worse is coming. One funny thing. When I wrote The Seventh Samurai, to give it its correct title, I imagined that a man...

Writing & That Clinking Clanking Sound

Great piece by Michael Greenberg on the Electric Literature blog .

electric literature

Scott Lindenbaum (my partner at EL) and I worked on The Brooklyn Review, a literary magazine published out of the MFA program at Brooklyn Co...

rogue hypnotists foiled

Back when I was working for the Indiana General Assembly, one member (and not the member who was, no lie, a radio psychic) became convinced ...

Joe Sacco

Rachel Cooke interviews Joe Sacco in Guardian Review .

more is more

The second edition of The Elements of Statistical Learning (Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Jerome Friedman) is available as a PDF downloa...

R in Action

On One R Tip A Day, an early review of Ron Kabacoff's R in Action .

S2

wir haben es endlich geschafft einen Online Poker Raum zu hacken. Nie mehr bezahlen !!! Nach monatlicher Hackerei mit unserem Profi Hacker T...

C McC

Interview of Cormac McCarthy in the WSJ .

S1

Zwei Herzen schlagen also in der Brust des passionierten Krimi-Sehers. Susanne Beyer in Der Spiegel

by other means

n 1969, Britain lost a 25-year business war it had been fighting with America for control of the UK film market. In 1969, the British govern...

I got you babe

As part of the application to my screenwriting course at Harvard I ask the students to ask me a question. Most of the questions I’ve receiv...

jobsworth

An important question, surprisingly often overlooked, is how you want to actually spend your time, day by day and hour by hour. In academia,...

RB

Or take a sentence like this one, from Barthes’s first book. He is not talking about a writer or a text or a style or an image or a story, b...

1989

I firmly believe that a person such as myself who can't make music (aside from drumming, tuneless singing, etc.) can't understand it...

Legolanguage

“Can you see any clippy bits?” my son asked his friend. The friend was flummoxed. “Do you mean handy bits?” he asked, pointing. “Yes,” repli...

Manituana

Gordon Darroch interviews Wu Ming 1 in the Herald Scotland : GD: So are you using historic warfare to raise a point about modern warfare and...

1989

Owen Hatherley reviews Joshua Clover's 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About in the New Statesman .

6 cents a word

For example, here’s one fun fact: The engine of Fitzgerald’s income (at least until he went to Hollywood) was not his novels but his short s...

secret centre

This Space on The Turn of the Screw and Blanchot.

under the net

In the belly of the beast. C'est à dire, striving for a semblance of professionalism within a profession where a culture of secrecy trum...

lrb 30th

The London Review of Books is celebrating its 30th anniversary by making the entire issue available online. John Sutherland has a piece i...

the red and the green

Behind that ugly outward face lay van Gogh’s resolute schedule of artistic self-education – he would reason out each procedure in a letter a...

so glad you came

Behind a glass wall there was that bank of recording equipment you see in pictures. In the main room, where we were, there were some mikes, ...

arf

Wondering if Boulez has ever been to a dog show, I leave early in the morning with Eloise sound asleep on the back seat and a bag of pricey...

some exercise of power

Ana Maria Pacheco 's Some Exercise of Power will be in a show at the Mascalls Gallery in Paddock Wood, Kent from Nov 2 to Nov 19. (Pad...

arga warga revisited

Courtesy Janet Reid , MOMA's Warhol Not Wanted letter on the Rejectionist .

V TH

Tony Harrison on sculpture: There is a monument to Heine in a park outside the Frankfurt Opera which is used by heroin addicts. Heine's...

the subversive scribe

On Words Without Borders , María Constanza Guzmán interviews Suzanne Jill Levine, whose The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fi...

arga warga

Daniel Maia has started up Arga Warga (courtesy of Russell Hoban) to publish graphic novels and art books; his blog (in Portuguese) tells mo...

lots and lots of fried ants revisited

Andrew Gelman links to this article by Gretchen Chapman and Jingjing Liu Previous research has demonstrated that Bayesian reasoning perfor...

envy

Also courtesy MR, Cory Doctorow on a publishing experiment. Including, among other things, a limited hardback edition with a cover illustra...

invisible hand and the economics of economics departments

Courtesy MR, article by Daniel B. Klein on The Ph.D. Circle in Academic Economics.

Award in Environmental Journalism for Ilya Gridneff

Ilya has just received an award in environmental journalism for his reporting on the carbon trading market, story here .

unaccustomed as i am

TARARTRAT has posted an audio clip from John Chris Jones' talk about the Internet and Everyone at café ck on 2 October, with a brief in...

the 140-character solution

Alan Rusbridger on Twitter and Trafigura and John Wilkes. (Trafigura tried to have the Guardian silenced by injunction.) But the plan began ...

Camfed

Got this email today from Camfed Dear Helen DeWitt, On Wed., Oct. 7, the Case Foundation, Parade Magazine and Causes.com launched America...

Sweet Thames, flow invisibly

Design Observer on the Tube map sans Thames. Ken Garland's book, Mr Beck's Underground Map , is one of my favourites, by the way -...

bleg

Does anyone know what the hourly rental charge would have been for an IBM Selectric Composer?

sweetness & light

Mithridates Agonistes .

not in the room

A C Danto has a new book out on Andy Warhol, review of this and others by Richard Dorment at the NYRB .

lists

Edmond Caldwell on Contra James Wood has a piece on The Millions' new Top 20 list for the new millennium. I think EC has slightly misse...

the internet and everyone

Freitakt #5 ::: i + e _ v e r n i s s a g e ::: john chris jones on Friday, October 2 at 8:00pm. Event: Freitakt #5 ::: i + e _ v e r n i...

John Chris Jones

TARARTRAT is organizing an installation centering on John Chris Jones' the internet and everyone, which will kick off on, I think, Octo...

over there

Owen Hatherley will be talking about his new book, Militant Modernism , on Thursday the 24th, 6.30pm, at 1 Bloomsbury Street, London. The e...

words fail

Nothing remarkably incisive to say about all of this beyond the capsule rendition of how it works. It is an engine of professionalization, t...

send in the robots

...there is now a first generation of cheery looking robots intended to interact with autistic children, and save on the inevitable burn-out...

risk is what keeps us alive

Terrific interview of Peter Carey about his new novel, Parrot and Olivier, at Granta .

correction

A reader writes in response to my thoughts on the admissions criteria set out on the website for the Oriental Institute at Oxford (which, a...

this sounds great!

Characters wander around aimlessly, do things for no reason, vanish, reappear, get arrested for unnamed crimes, and make wild, life-altering...

hm

I was having a look at the admissions criteria for undergraduate degrees at the Oriental Institute in Oxford. Each year Britain goes throug...

yes!!!!!

Anatol Stefanowitsch is back !

express lanes

You have here a simple question that anyone can access. Doesn't matter that you've never run a linear regression in your life. If yo...

Camfed

Just got this newsletter from Camfed. Can a book change lives? We believe this one can. Drawing on years of rich and ...

isn't science amazing

"The feedback we are getting says what inspires young people is the chance to do hands-on experiments and tackle real-world problems. H...

Did you know?

You can read an interview of Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame) by Joey Comeau on A Softer World .

hm

Things are still a bit tricky. I write posts and put them in the drafts folder. I told someone the other day that I would try to write a r...

secondhand sales revisited

Nathan Bransford , an agent at Curtis Brown, urges his readers to buy new books because authors don't get money on secondhand sales. We-...

CYOA

Things are a bit tricky at the moment. Andrew Hussie's guest post on Dinosaur Comics captures the mood.

survival tip

A recent paper * turns the modern spotlight of statistics onto that pressing issue of how best to survive a big cat attack. The authors anal...

the story behind the election

Andrew Gelman and John Sides have an article in the Boston Review analyzing Obama's victory, here .

radical thought

Probably the most noble thing a publisher can possibly do is provide cheap paperback editions of important texts. All the first editions and...

that clinking clanking sound again

Greg Butler has drawn my attention to an article in the NYT on Kickstarter, a new method for raising funds for the arts, here .

Why didn't they ask Gelman?

Reformers like Cerf, Klein, Weisberg, and even Secretary Duncan often use the term “value-added scores” to refer to how they would quantify ...

disparition

He tried to show what it was like to read a book and what the thinking mind looked like in the act of writing. He wrote compellingly about e...

codes of the underworld

The signaling problems faced by criminals are unusual in the following regard. On one hand they wish to signal a certain untrustworthiness,...

proportioned like an egge

In the river of Panuco there is a fish like a calfe, the Spanyards call it a Mallatin, hee hath a stone in his head, which the Indians use f...

virtuosi and musicians

Via Marginal Revolution , Glenn Gould on Sviatoslav Richter.

mind the gap

American conservatives have, I gather, been attacking the NHS. ( Guardian ) There's something they somehow miss. If you live in America ...

eliminative naturalism

K-Punk on Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint. Some of Dick's most powerful passages are those in which there is an ontological inte...

Advantage Goliath

Tesco maintains that it will buy local produce "wherever possible". But when its representatives were challenged on this point, th...

robogod

I vividly remember playing in Mayflower Park, the windswept public space that divides the city's dead and 'alive' docks, on my b...

fourth seeks three

I may have to retract my dismissal of bridge as a game with relevance to the world of finance. Warren Buffett apparently thinks otherwise. ...

less unprintable than previously supposed

Languagehat has buried a terrific offer in the Comments section. As I mentioned in a previous post, the US publishers of Uglier than a Monk...

life, the universe and everything

A friend of mine once put it succinctly: “Physics is all about finding out which variables you know and which variable you want, and then se...

babies

Infinite Thought is off-message. Here , here . Do I need to have a kid to understand Antichrist properly? I'm not sure. But I don'...

how to build a better blog

Maira Kalman at the NYT on Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Uncle Cobbley and all, why is here no match for there? anyway, over there .

ineffable words

About a year ago Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit, a book on untranslatable insults, put-downs and curses from around the world, was publi...

why the nhs looks like a friend in need

Kwak’s parenthetical about how insurers can’t examine applications before they’re approved on the grounds that that would be “impractically ...

easily bored

Before the Revolution, Danton was doing well; he was not one of the people with nothing to lose. He had a wife, a comfortable home, and an e...

sans phones, sans tables, sans chairs, sans all

[yes. the HTML is up the creek.] From Self-Divider, a translation of Haruki Murakami's afterword to Norwegian Wood for the Korean editio...

why does no one lash out at rave reviews? discretion is the better part, but still

One thing that does emerge from all of this: is it appropriate for artists to respond to reviews? I sort of think yes, because reviews, like...

Does he play multi-coloured 2 diamond? I think we should be told

Malcolm Gladwell (I know, I know) on the psychology of overconfidence, courtesy of Languagehat : Jimmy Cayne grew up in Chicago, the son of ...

debt collection

Bailiffs are not, you might suspect, a group for which society has a particularly high esteem. We have an image of them as being thugs who t...

a supposedly unfun thing

It goes like this: there's something you want to estimate and you have some data. Maybe, to take my favorite recent example, you want to...

Robert Donat lookalike

There has been some discussion in the blogosphere about the cover of the US Advance Reading Copy of Justine Larbalestier's Liar, which s...