transfiguration

I had put three months into the catalog essay for the MoMA show, reading about her performances and about her life. I had spent some time in...

Expressing the problem using a population distribution rather than a probability distribution has an additional advantage: it forces us to ...

if that isn't aura it'll have to do

Olav Velthuis’s Talking Prices , in contrast to the reductive analyses of Thompson and Galenson, is an extremely wide-ranging and subtle g...

Glenda the Good v. Wicked Witch of the West

By some estimates, about 40 percent of the cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions. (Drug offenses in the U.S....

crowdsourcing

British high-end chocolate maker and retailer Hotel Chocolat , which currently operates over 40 stores in the UK, the Middle East and the U...

At the beck and call of my consciousness are two or three little words: i vot ['and here'], uzhé ['already'], vdrug [...

‘Many, too many of us, children of the Jewish intelligentsia, are madly, shamefully in love with Russian culture,’ the Zionist Vladimir Jabo...

It is not the actual emotion itself that is unsettling to Flaubert, but the temptation to be dragged down by it and the sickly need to exhib...

Their world was very firmly divided between Jews and goyim. If there was a plane crash and fifty people were killed, my Aunt Rose, the most ...

The question then arises: what does consciousness add to what unconsciousness can achieve? To put it another way, what mental processes are ...

‘We all reach a time when the god Hercules leaves us.’ Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, reviewed by Frank Kermode , LRB 22-02-01

I don’t think that living through an artificial self, which is what had got me into such an awful mess, is all that uncommon. The condition ...

Serialism itself was, for me and for my generation, very helpful because it gave a very strict discipline; and then after that, on...

hm

The New Republic posts a CV from Adam Wheeler, who had bluffed his way into Harvard and now wanted an internship with TNR. TNR is scornful...

Der Klempner

For a week or so there has been a blocked drain in the flat I'm subletting. Whenever I ran the washing machine water came up through th...

If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like? That's from Hudson Collins, loyal MR ...

Arte dello squallore, arte parassita, della mortificazione. Superficie della desolazione, superficie ottusa. Un’arte repulsiva che non rappr...

damn lies and good graphs

maybe they're right that crappy chartjunk graphs are better than crappy non-chartjunk graphs. But I don't think it's appropriate...

My next book, La Réticence (1991), was written entirely in response to Camera . Critics had talked a lot about how light and virtuoso Camera...

Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit e...

Camus : il a souvent éprouvé une sorte de malaise, parfois de l'impatience, à se voir immobilisé par ses livres; non seulement à cause d...

hello goodbye

Trackbacks Aucun trackback. Les trackbacks pour ce billet sont fermés. Commentaires Aucun commentaire pour le ...

More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a w...

...

" Eigensinn is a word that doesn't translate very well into English," Enzensberger explains while finishing off a third cup ...

Samurai update

As part of an extra-credit project, Ivan Jaffe has persuaded Potbelly Sandwiches , Chicago to put The Last Samurai on display. So thanks, ...

fighting words

Yep, it has been scientifically proven: the accuracy of people in describing charts with 'chart junk' is no worse than for plain cha...

fried ants revisited

Justin Fox sums up the overwhelming majority of economics papers in one sentence: The basic form of an academic economics paper is a coupl...

Calling Torvill and Dean

Electronically Read Editions: The right to publish the text of published print editions of the Property via the Internet and in the form of ...

A: 42

Some of us sat downstairs in Islington with Douglas Adams’s editor, the saintly and incomparable Sue Freestone, typing out chapter after cha...

Gordon Lish in the House of Bayes

Andrew Gelman gives a statistician's take on the Lish method: In any case, in the grand tradition of reviewing the review, I have some t...

oh to be in London

IT : We’re very pleased to announce that the writer and activist Tariq Ali is coming to the saveMDXphil occupation this Saturday 15 May, 3:3...

to the tune of My Country 'Tis of Thee...

‘We are all here for a citizenship ceremony this afternoon, is that correct?’ the council registrar asked. A general mutter of assent. ‘Thi...

the trick of it

Suppose we have 100 mortgages that pay $1 or $0. The probability of default is 0.05. We pool the mortgages and then prioritize them into t...

the ask

While in Boston I read Sam Lipsyte's new book, The Ask . A witty paean to white-collar loserdom in the fund-raising racket, “The Ask” de...

Andrew Gelman on religious affiliation of Supreme Court justices. With graphs.

books overfurnish a room

New Yorkers. Jenny Davidson is trying to get rid of books. Would happily give them to anyone willing to pick up (she's up by Columbia)...

books overfurnish a room

New Yorkers. Jenny Davidson is trying to get rid of books. Would happily give them to anyone willing to pick up (she's up by Columbia)...

strawberries & pims

When I was at Oxford, a very long time ago, I took out a life membership to the Oxford Union for something like £70. This would have worked...

electoral reform

Paddy Allen explains AV .

oases

WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me...

MMMMMMMMMM

more subtly invidious is the simple fact that people are so unused to seeing women appointed to the court that it's somehow a scandal to...

the house style

Mark Liberman finds a site, Onlinestylebooks.com , that lets you search 43 stylebooks at once: Surveying this explicit variety of sources ma...

deanery

Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy on Elena Kagan's qualification to be Supreme Court justice: The real flaw in Campos’ and Mirengoff’s...

Another, fairly astonishing Postconstructivist scheme is the Svirstroy Housing Complex, finished as late as 1938, in bare concrete and red r...

one's own Brain

When, in the 1760s, the Earl of Hardwicke attempted to commission Gainsborough to paint a view for him, the artist replied: Mr Gainsborough ...

ppv v fp

When asked about the accuracy of a mammogram, doctors cite the "false positive rate". Ignore the false positive rate, what patient...

no taxation w/o representation

Unbelievably depressed by UK election results. I really thought the Liberal Democrats could pull it off this time - get a number of seats t...

There are revealingly few references to Baudelaire in the Journal, the most telling of which seems at first sight prosaic, indeed calm: ...

AAA

Imagine a school with three teachers. But this isn't a public school. It's a private school testing out an innovative new funding sy...

in remembrance of crayolas past

Results of xkcd colour survey are out By a strange coincidence, the same night I first made the color survey public, the webcomic Doghouse D...

Britain deserves the best

Esche stated the case clearly it in an earlier meeting: ‘Reputation has no financial value in this university.’ That isn’t necessarily true ...

and they all go marching...

Every summer, I get calls from people who are puzzled to find a heap of dead Argentine ants in their freezer. The ants are attracted to some...

The real explosion in customized derivatives came in the aughts, and in particular, after 2005. Why after 2005? There are a couple of theori...

i am not a number

Bruce Falconer on a German torture colony in Chile, ht MR.

get thee behind me tolkien

Magical thinking isn’t fantasy in the literary sense. It is a fantasy, in the psychoanalytic sense: a dream of a world where actions don’t h...

At the Casual Optimist, Q&A with Ferrán Lopez, book designer for Random House Mondadori

100 best Arabic books

Courtesy Marginal Revolution , a link to M. Lynx Qualey's blog Arabic Literature in English, which has posted an annotated translation o...

continent cut off

Mark Liberman discusses 'beg the question' on Language Log. A commenter chips in. As to whether 'begs the question' is an a...