"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...