observation

But in a person there lives a small observer – he takes part in neither actions nor sufferings – he is always cold-blooded and always the sa...

why is this night different from all other nights

Came back to the motel early yesterday afternoon and found an e-mail from a reader in the Boston area, Leah Archibald, asking if I would lik...

EHJC reveal some

There's an interview of Emily Horne and Joey Comeau (of A Softer World ) at comicbookresources.com .

ttt

I'm in Boston, staying in a motel in Framingham. Was surprised to find that Framingham has a large Brazilian population - the taxi to t...

new game new game new game

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has a post on the role of computers in improving educational achievement in the young. Ofer Malamud and...

Modernis t fiction is that fiction that does not tease you into thinking that you can win. adswithoutproducts

Stevens thou shouldst be living at this hour

He was a very imaginative claims man. I mean that he was never satisfied handling cases entirely according to routine. One of the things in ...

War and War

Interviewed at the 2009 Venice festival, Yoav Donat, one of the actors [in Lebanon ], said: ‘This is not a movie that makes you think: “I’ve...

From Dataviz , via Revolutions . Obama recently appointed ET to the Recovery Independent Advisory Commission. Excelsior.

passive competence

And so, beginning in the early 1980s, I learned a new language. I began by purchasing Teach Yourself Czech. Taking advantage of the length (...

ephemeroi

Sir Kenneth Dover has died, obituary by Stephen Halliwell here . The Time obituary comments: What captivated him in classical Greece was, ...

say it ain't so

Joel Spolsky is going to give up blogging on March 18, the 10th anniversary of Joel on Software. He has also written his last column for In...

boredom containers

The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shi...

hypercorrection

Went to see The Ghost Writer the other day. The ghost writer tracks down a senior academic who seems to be linked to the former prime minis...

i'm a real samurai

Veblen, an inveterate reader of ethnographies, noticed a historical pattern that could illuminate America’s peculiar relationship with its e...

steel magnolias

Toward the end of January things went badly wrong with Bill Clegg, the agent who then represented me, to the point where he resigned and was...