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...

The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook — with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection — reflects, magni...

They say that if you love something you should set it free. And if it returns it’ll be yours forever. I’m starting to find that this may act...

New Labour’s policy on celebrity sheen - populism without popularity - was part-and-parcel of a well-documented world of spin, shady unelect...

So if a certain disease is more common in rich people within a country, that's big news because it suggests that something unusual is go...

I think some of the confusion that has arisen from Ed Tufte's work is that people read his book and then want to go make cool graphs of ...

It is said that analysts of the fighting in World War Two, concerned at the apparent reluctance to participate or even fire their weapons of...

I meet Sam Frank of Triple Canopy at Neues Ufer. It's hot. We're both sweating. I apologise many times for being shellshocked.

it's a kitty!

I find that my landlady is unfamiliar with the classic xkcd on cat proximity. I tell her to do a search on Google for xkcd and kitty.

British rendition of British citizens, Ian Cobain and Owen Boycott at the Guardian

Lydia Davis’s mysterious, uncomfortably intimate short stories are often read as the working out on paper of her own very ordinary difficult...

It's 2.29 am. My landlady is out in the street meowing loudly to call her cat home. MEOOOW. MRROOOWWW. MEEEEOOOOWWWW.

Sleede took his measures: silently, as was his way. He vanished one day in search of a rare component of Damascus ink that was believed to i...

"A good photograph," he said, "will prove to the viewer how little our eyes permit us to see. Most people only see what they...

Last Call

Cowen on Last Call: Okrent can't claim to have discovered Prohibition; Michael Lerner's recent Dry Manhattan is another good entr...

WWw

Earth has not anything to show more fair Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty The City now doth lik...

Poems recited 10.00-10.55 am, 23.09.09, 1325 Avenue of the Americas

There is a wide, high passageway at street level through the fortress that is 1325 Ave. of the Americas. On 22.09.09 she came to identify th...

Daytona Beach

My mother's suit is like a Homeric weapon, a garment with a history behind it.

le chat de mon amie

elle aurait naturellement aimé écrire camus a dit, ma patrie c'est la langue française elle est sans papiers mais mwa! mwa! mwa! c'e...

Cadogan Terrace, 199?

Piece by Sean O'Hagan in the Guardian about Victoria Miro, a gallerist. The agent we long for.

Awesomeness of Internet

She meets a reader for coffee. He tells her she's being defeatist. Think of the Awesomeness of the Internet! She gets an email from a ...

unable to understand basic sentences

Overall, I found the experiments fairly convincing. I do worry a bit about what some colleagues and I used to call "the paper airplane...

Our team of psychic managers carefully screens all of our psychics before they are hired. They continue to monitor all psychics during the t...

Leah Archibald sends word of an oktokaidekapus t-shirt.

She writes posts in French. She writes badly. She prefers the third person. She does something stupid, writing in English: it serves no p...

not waving

The new captain jumped from the cockpit, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim a...

Some common abuses of arsenic were a good deal grimmer even than real and fictional characters doing away with their unwanted spouses (at le...

hm

There's a piece by Wyatt Mason in NYRB on Lipsky's book about David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself...

... I started out in the 1950s like many young experimental artists with a strong commitment to most of the received ideas of early 20th cen...