always the last to know

Checking out Cosma Shalizi's Three-Toed Sloth, discovered that David Freedman had died. (Freedman is the Freedman of Freedman, Pisani an...

x-geniture

Simon Briscoe in the FT on the effect of birth date on acceptance to grammar schools (I take it the point is that a summer child is assessed...

London calling

Courtesy Infinite Thought : on 31 January, at 6.30 pm, Chine Mieville will be introducing Night of the Living Dead at the Prince Charles. O...

Bauman

A couple of readers have expressed interest in reading more by Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman's most important book, the one that introduced the...

Fog Creek Open House

Fog Creek is having an open house on Friday the 30th; the kind of person who would be interested in this is probably also on the e-list, but...

nowhere to go

My father, John DeWitt, was a Foreign Service Officer. His first overseas posting was to Monterrey, Mexico, where he worked 8 hours a day is...

the illions

Courtesy of Marginal Revolution , a Newsweek interview with Gideon Gono, central banker of Zimbabwe: Your critics blame your monetary polici...

over there

I was trying to think of a way to explain Puppet Stayman to Evan Lavender-Smith, and not really succeeding, which is not to say I did not se...

SOAS Arabic course

A reader once wrote to ask: Do you really think learning Arabic will make people stop killing each other? I assure you this is wrong. I'...