Dostoïevski était raciste, son antisémitisme s’inscrivant dans un racisme foncier ; ses lettres ont, en plus, un caractère hystérique qui fa...

During a recent visit, it was clear that for every marijuana seller and physician who thinks that the rules are too strict, murky or fluid, ...

Somewhat terrifying discovery. Have been writing lots of posts and putting them in the drafts folder. Something to do with lack of belief i...

But the idea that somebody might choose not to publish—or might choose to publish in a small circulation magazine rather than a large circul...

Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled b...

another 20

On Emerging Writers , Dzanc Books has an alternative list of 20 writers to watch.

The way the books industry is interacting with digital media is developing faster than many had foreseen, with the latest example an attemp...

cop-ed

And yet the Lost and Found series has an irony about it too: what were once intended as ephemera, or as the most informal of documents, to b...

Britain Britain Britain

Andrew Gelman has a post in which he links to an old post of mine on Seth Godin. Andrew took me to endorse the position of Seth Godin. ...

Andrew Gelman on Christian Robert on classics of statistics.

Perhaps a tendency toward adulation and loathing comes naturally with the weakness for great causes. Politicians and people Hitchens disappr...

Languagehat has a terrific account of Martha Ackmann's Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone: The First Woman to Play Professio...

tired dad soldiers on

When things went wrong with BC I told SMcD I thought I'd spent too long in Britain. Tired Dad is the kind of thing I LIKED about Britain...

Back in 2000 I went down to London for a photoshoot at Interview magazine. I had a minder. I said something euphemistic to the minder. So...

gamesmanship

Perhaps nothing has been more influential in determining the popular perception of the Italian game than furbizia, the art of guile... The w...

crash blossoms

I figured that my example, a news headline containing the extraordinarily garden-path-leading word sequence proposed to by a lightning strik...

For friends who've read LR: The harassment allegedly culminated in an outright assault at the Frankfurt Book Fair last October when, acc...

Bernardo Moraes, Brazilian author of Minimundo, has an interview of me up on his blog . Minimundo can also be downloaded in Portuguese and ...

I got a text message last night from Jeff Treviño , a musician living in Berlin, suggesting I meet him and a friend at Nollendorfplatz. Tir...

ce sont seulement mon enfance et mon adolescence dont les images me fascinent encore

• Patients are less likely to die in the bigger, busier hospital units where surgical teams are more skilled because they do more of the ope...

a mortuis nil litterarum

June 2010 David Markson died in. It would be fitting if his gravestone had "Wittgenstein" misspelled on it. As he suggested Th...

I once got to second base with a basketball player

[Cliff Notes for one of my books in regress] [Why Bill & I needed more than 3 hours]

mind-reading fatigue revisitedl

Researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests to gauge people's reactions when exposed to four background noise settings...

These latest volumes of The History of Parliament are the fullest file on Old Corruption ever likely to be compiled, and they finally make ...

For those who don't follow these things, Lorin Stein, former editor at Farrar, Straus, Giroux, is now editor of the Paris Review, and th...

Terrific piece by Drew Johnson on O. Henry at the Rumpus. Much of interest re OH, but it's the drive-by shootings that cheer: As a fak...

My notes are voluminous because my interests have never been very narrowly focused. My subject is what I think of as the historical ethnogra...

These powerful, simple explanations are often married to an almost monastic skepticism of narratives that can’t be substantiated, or that ar...