Readers of pp will know that this time last year I was staying in Silver Spring with my mother, who had had an operation. She went in for a...

care to share

A reader sent me a link to a video of a poem he wrote and performs.

To mark National Poetry, Day Nick Rennison, who compiled the Waterstone's Guide to Poetry, and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Ca...

The most extraordinary detail that's actually still there is the tube. The fact that people don't look at it is proof of its efficie...

under the hood

“You say autism, or Down syndrome, and people know somebody,” said Ms. Dopp, who stays home with Jackson and his three siblings. “When you t...

black swans

Andrew Gelman revisits his review of Taleb's The Black Swan. And then there are parts of the review that make me really uncomfortable. ...

Tabarrok on Arrow

Arrow showed that when a group chooses, there are no underlying preferences to uncover--not even in theory. In one sense , the theorem is tr...

QAQAQA

I gave an e-interview to Mike Lee a while back for his website, GGGOZU.COM. His photographer turned up shortly before the Elevenses at Thre...

elevenses at 3

Sara Ortiz of McNally Jackson Books has very kindly offered to let me turn up there and see if anyone else turns up. Had been thinking of s...

Things have been rather difficult lately for various reasons. I'm going to New York tomorrow to talk to some people; I'll be there u...

Aeschylus's Oresteia is held up – again in spot-on fashion – as a template for an anti-humanist worldview: what matters is not the ind...

Their research is responsible for one of the most distinctive features of Yakutsk. The majority of its large buildings are raised three or f...

"Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian letters," Safar replied. "But nothing good ever came of it. They took a...

Distractions

A nationwide hunt was launched today for a tiny Mediterranean snail which has turned up in the UK after stowing away on stonework imported a...

vive la différance

As for the French writers, artists and actors who mixed in German circles, what comes across most strikingly is their ­vanity, self-centredn...

Buffettgate

Already a cult text among gold enthusiasts and inflation phobes (old copies of the original hardback were until recently trading at up to £1...

There remains, however, William H. Gass’ Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation ; Roger Hahn’s painstakingly-researched P...

Unlike most authors I find that the date of publication invariably coincides with the moment when my loathing for my book reaches its maximu...

I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 an...

Liège is, however, very much the sort of city I like - sombre, industrial, topographically melodramatic, utterly modern, and, occasionally,...

Obituary of Frank Kermode in the Guardian.

Statisticians hate small numbers (samples); now there is another reason to hate small numbers. In one word, scams. The FTC has shut down a s...

Granger causality is a standard statistical technique for determining whether one time series is useful in forecasting another. It is import...

the pooch in the hall

In short, for a serious cartoonist, a dog is not so much a warm, cuddly comfort as a self-inflicted wound. Joe Sacco at NY Times Book Revie...

But if it can’t be said exactly how Shakespeare happened, there are contexts that help to throw light. I want to glance at two of them here....

There is much more of interest here . I would describe this as a major, still uninternalized lesson of the recent crisis, with its roller c...

Trevor Butterworth interviews Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, at Lunch with the FT .

The books continued not to appear

Trevor-Roper was captured by the second, and married into the first. Enemies invariably called him ‘arrogant’. But it seems that he was neve...

Gay liberation made its way, strangely, into the seminaries. I have a letter from a friend, an Irish writer, sent in response to a piece I w...

I AIN'T PEOPLE

But it’s a fact of life, in your late teens and early twenties, that’s just what people do: they go out. Taylor Plimpton, at the Paris Revi...

Sapir-Whorf and ggplot2

To some degree, we are constrained in our ability to solve problems if we only know a single language. This situation has been recognized di...

ESPN's Bill Simmons (aka The Sports Guy) recently suggested that the primary cause of dwindling interest in Red Sox games by fans is tha...

that clinking clanking sound

In a letter to the editor in 1988, literary critic Eddie Dow tried to set the record straight: In 1926 Fitzgerald published one of his fi...

Richard Morgan on freelancing at The Awl.

Via MR, video of British town that turned its traffic lights off:

doing the decent thing

Colleen Lindsay wraps up at FinePrint Literary Management.

Thank you

When I got home from my German class today an envelope had come in the post. I opened it. An anonymous reader had sent me many, many, many...

My other Carter story comes from a conversation I had a couple years ago with an economist who's about my age, a man who said that one r...

Sometimes when I do turn it over, the situation actually get worse, because that's God's plan for their lives. They may need the pai...

Amazon has some terrific podcast interviews of Joe Sacco , whose Footnotes in Gaza has recently been published.

In his interview with Robert McCrum of the Guardian, DeLillo said his parents came from the Abruzzi, they wanted him to be an American, the...

- His friends and loved ones wonder why he has such a complexly dark relationship to his own physicality, even his corporeal mortality. If i...

Courtesy MR, Keith Hennessey on The Roles of the President's White House economic advisors . Tyler Cowen is right to say: to excerpt wo...

Literature helps me to live, but wouldn’t it be truer to say that it furthers this sort of life? Which of course doesn’t imply that my life ...

Frederick Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month , talks about his new book, The Design of Design , on Wired : Brooks: Great design does...

Jacket copy has a list of 20 classic works of gay literature. Renaud Camus's Tricks and Robert Gluck's Jack the Modernist are nowh...

Extraordinary portfolio of photographs by R. Kolewe .

David Levinson on editors who edit the book they wish they'd bought.

Robert McCrum interviews DeLillo at the Guardian .

With seeming effortlessness, Keilson performs the difficult trick of showing how a single psyche can embrace many contradictory thoughts, an...

valedictory address

I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot s...

“The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why ...

Narzißmus der kleinen Differenzen

This is one of the most intense, bitter and personalized exchanges that I've ever seen in the scientific or technical literature. And it...

Lunch with the FT : Emily Stokes has lunch with Lydia Davis.

What “Mentor” is really about, though, is the slow-motion derailment of Mr. Grimes’s own once promising literary career, a process that took...

Once I began to take Prozac, I lost my ability to make metaphors. My thinking became literal; I couldn’t make connections between seemingly ...

Imagine that French were a dead language. I could just as well have said: Represent that to yourselves, French, a dead language. And in som...

And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia. Other writers who visited collecti...

Rajiv Sethi has a terrific post on David Blackwell , of whom the Texan wife of the department head at Berkeley said: I'm not having that...

More conversations and emails. I say the wrong thing. Life is unfair. People who work very hard and do the right thing sometimes go under: t...

What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect so...

I’ve remarked before that, once I became a practicing scientist, I realized I had taken all of the wrong courses as a student. Although I st...

Andrew Gelman on statistical fallacies in baseball reportage.

My landlady has gone on holiday to Italy. I'm here with the cats. One of which likes to spend the day out in the street. As it turns out...

I recognize that "language exams" can be (and sometimes are) designed to test something other than language proficiency. When I wa...

The first rule is an "internal" one: it has nothing to do with your relation with others, it concerns you yourself in isolation....

Burkett & Griffiths (2010) go a long way to applying populaitonal thinking to language evolution. They describe a Bayesian model of lan...

HDW MEETS AGENT

Terrific piece by Jonathan Franzen on Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children , at the NY Times Book Review . From Randall Jarrell...

With the advent of swift and easy electronic transmission of written messages (e-mail, STM, etc.), the opportunity for Cantonese speakers to...

In 1994 Ginsberg sold his archives to Stanford University for a million dollars, but after all the deductions for the auction house, his age...

From David Markson's edition of The Waste Land, recently bought by some lucky bugger at the Strand. My friend Ethan paid not enough mone...

The only time I ever thought of suicide was in a graduate program -- not at Cornell, fortunately, so no bridge available. Every other time I...

The Last Samurai will be the Fall Read at Conversational Reading , starting September 19. More here .

Up in Prenzlauerberg visiting David Levinson. I called David this morning and asked if I could come up and stay with him for a week and he ...

The Confederacy, McCurry writes, was conceived as a "republic of white men." But since of its 9 million people more than 3 million...

The most daunting real-world problem Roth has solved so far: New York City's high school match, which he tackled in 2003. While many Ame...

samizdat

A long time ago I was invited to submit some short stories to Harper's. The editor who wrote to me loved the 2 stories I sent in. She s...

“There would be a package of seeds for a pumpkin, and there would be a picture with the word ‘PUMPKIN,’” said Blackwell. “That’s how I learn...

The judge, who said Jacques had no mitigation, told him: "You are a Cambridge graduate and should know better, I suppose. Book thief br...

Twitter also seems to have an interesting property: the limited message size lends itself to informality so people are less concerned, and i...

After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Ins...

People who don’t do statistics are usually drawn to individual stories or scenarios. I look for scenarios which are informative about risks ...

boids

Alex Tabarrok on bird death. How Stuff Works on statistics of bird death. (Wind turbines 10,000-40,000; power lines 130-174 million...) A...

Internet as Consolation

Joshua Cohen has asked me to write a piece on Internet as Consolation for the Dalkey Archive's Review of Contemporary Fiction. What abou...

“There are two schools of thought as to why the Germans love board games,” says Martin Wallace of Warfrog. “The Germans are of the opinion t...

Typical of the African situation were the Mende, who kept considerable numbers of slaves for both social and economic reasons and on the who...

The class of the lowly is the source from which the master class draws its livelihood and leisure. Thraldom is a degree of cannibalism. It i...

Let us begin with the Tupinamba of South America, a primitive, warlike group among whom slavery existed in its most elementary for. Economic...

For all of Timoney’s messianic zeal, his efforts instilled little faith in the loose confederation of addiction counselors and rehab provide...

that clinking clanking sound

With the explosion of the Internet and the ease of downloading music onto your computer, a whole new royalty arena has opened up in recent y...

Farrar, Straus and Giroux has decided to let readers peek behind the scenes at one of the most delicate parts of the publishing business: th...