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...

Patxi

Yesterday. I have a phone appointment with an agent for 5 pm. Hate the phone, so go to Café Toronto at 3 to calm my nerves. At 4.30 a busk...

take that

Towards the end of his life, he listed “Ten common mistakes in the production of books,” the first of which was “Books which are needlessly ...

café life

I've been in Berlin for four years, and I still don't really get the tipping system. My friend Ingrid explained a while back that it...

Best Disclaimer in the World

Just to be clear, though, I didn't make these maps; I'm just linking to them. Andrew Gelman clarifies a post on some excellent grap...

the black man's game

Beckham belongs in Italy. That’s all I’m going to say about that. Sorry. I mean, I love L.A., but the guy is still a great footballer. He sh...

the knight with the two swords

Thought there was too much about business on pp. Wondered whether readers knew of Vinaver's edition of Malory (published by Oxford Univ...

rate of change

A while back I came across a blog post discussing the teaching of mathematics in schools. (I think the link is buried somewhere deep in the...

Pip was right

In contrast, a number of other Enlightenment theorists (Adam Smith, Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, for exam...

the 66% solution, or: baked beans are off

Martin Amis, Al Alvarez and Melvyn Bragg discussed suicide last week at an event at the University of Manchester's Center for New Writin...

everybody knows

What do you consider your darkest hour? LC: Well I wouldn't tell you about it if I knew. Even to talk about oneself in a time like this...

the pleasures and sorrows of singular they

Are you an excellent primary teacher who prides themselves in their method of delivery of the national curriculum? If so, a cool job awaits:...

more more more

Courtesy Mark Sarvas on the Elegant Variation , piece on a Boston book club for the homeless.

head to head

Over on Learning R , the intrepid RLearner is going through Deepayan Sarkar's book on data visualization using Lattice and replicating t...

that formerly clinking clanking sound

John Scalzi on internships: What bothers me about unpaid internships is not fundamentally that they are unpaid (although that really isn’t ...

but--

When I was 13 my father went to Cali, Colombia as American Consul. My mother was a member of the book club, which worked like this: each me...

friendly fire

At what point exactly does quotation morph into plagiarism? Came across an old post on Joelonsoftware of terrifying relevance: Once you get...

high life, low life

From Languagehat : [...] Concerning Vladimir Vladimirovich: people who have read his memoirs (I have not read them) write to me with amazeme...

walkways

Courtesy Owen Hatherley at Sit Down Man You're A Bloody Tragedy, a terrific post on the Beech Street underpass at the Barbican on Will W...

yes, minister

Chris Bryant, the new Foreign Office minister, is encouraging British ambassadors to support gay communities. In a letter to the British amb...

B, B

...la jeunesse est aussi ce fragment d'existence où arrive aisément que l'on s'imagine très singulier, dans le moment où l'o...