Happy New Year

Looking back over the year.  Somewhat stunned by the extraordinary kindness and generosity so many people have shown -- many of them strange...

phlegm

It turns out that a portion of the talent required to survive in the trenches of the ATP Tour is emotional: Joyce is able to keep from getti...

...The reverence with which he approached Frege's ideas, and the irritation and puzzlement with which he often approached the ideas of ...

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that if conditional probabilities are reinterpreted as frequencies, people have no problem in i...

post hoc, ergo propter hoc (not)

... A lot of success stories we hear are despite the system, not because of it, and the sooner we recognize that, the better the chances th...

below the cut

As I think I've said somewhere or other, I've given an awful lot of interviews recently.  Often by e-mail. And the editorial view --...

The guiding principle of Graeber's sweeping global history is that debt must not remain the exclusive property of economic historians, ...

Carter: Well, first of all, my mother made her living writing memoirs and extremely autobiographical novels about her family, and there w...

Feliz Navidad

Javier Moreno has translated That Obscure Object of Desire (published in a recent edition of Bullett Magazine) into Spanish - the language i...

Spoiled by the power of your best tools, you tend to shy away from messy calculations or long, case-by-case arguments unless they are abso...

LPTHW

I hope it was not bad form to clarify a few points that were not quite right in Michael Miller's piece ; I am not convinced that I would...

chrono

I posted a link yesterday to Michael Miller's profile in the Observer.  I'm not sure that it's not petty to correct details of c...

Rashomon

Michael Miller has published a profile in the New York Observer, here . It's a curious thing. If an industry is governed by a culture of...

the Cassandra Sydrome

The Last Samurai is, for the time being, well and truly out of print. Not because sales of a paltry few hundred a year had caused its publis...

How Shape Influences Strength

Rereading Alex Martelli, How Shape Influences Strength, Bridge World Jan & Feb 2000. NS Tricks // N has 7222 // N has 7321 6 // 4019 // ...

nomina nuda tenemus

Went to Paris at the beginning of the month to give a talk at the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University in Paris.  E...

Tyler Cowen at MR , linking here : Coffee shops around the world have employed loyalty card schemes for many years, but now we’ve come acro...

xmas is coming

Have just been talking to my publicist.  Lightning Rods has had very good reviews, many interviews were given, but sales are a few significa...

Think about it: Almost 40 percent of Amazon’s customers, according to this poll, have added a complicated step (the time-consuming and not...

First rule of Fight Club

♦ Contract provisions This one seems obvious, but many authors don’t realize how many things are covered in their contract and hence are su...

Odontogriphus omalus was an early slug-like mollusk, related to the more heavily armored Wiwaxia.  Life Before Dinosaurs

Trying to answer some questions, including one about cuts in review sections in print media. I check in on some blogs and find this on Rajiv...

J-P Sartre Cookbook

October 10 I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so...

one last interview . . .

with Brian Feinblum of Planned Television Arts, here