split or steal

HT Ben Goldacre, amazing display of psychology and game theory on a game show, here .

et tu, Brute?

I received this email from an eighth-grader: “Listen, I love your work, but seriously? Selling out to the state test? “Also, before my class...

xkcd

talk the talk

At the end of the 18th century, Nazarene painter Eberhard Wachter rejected a position on the staff of the Stuttgart academy, noting that ‘...

(mute)

Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, to take the most pervasive of these models, had been a highly popular way to theorize the internet in the ...

read 'em and weep

Went to Vogt's Bier-Express for a Duckstein.  They had two poker tables set up at the back of the room. A guy told me the tournament sta...

In patriotic duty bound, the Cambridge of Newton adhered to Newton's fluxions, to Newton's geometry, to the very text of Newton'...

It’s salutary to remember that the C.I.A. poured hundreds of millions into culture. For example, there was a festival of atonal music in Pa...

dutch day 3

Our teacher explains today that Dutch is much fonder than German of Verbalisierung.  (Our teacher switched happily back and forth between Ge...

be on the one hand good, and do not on the other hand be bad

Rich Beck has a terrific discussion of The Last Samurai on Emily Books , of which this is my favourite line: DeWitt, working at a time when ...

not satirizing anything

TM: I was really struck by the tone of the book. It seems weirdly refined in a way that was oddly familiar to me, but that I couldn’t qui...

over the rainbow

My job is not only watching film. The most interesting part will be in June, July, and August when I meet the filmmakers, read scripts, and...

calculated risks

Fortunately, when you purchase a low-powered car from Young Marmalade, the free installation of a black box can cut your insurance premium...

pudding meet alice

(pp, vegetarian since 1985, reads a piece in which a vegetarian interviews a man who gives cows a nice life before they become steak) Logan:...

yet another interview

with Andy Seisberg, for Emilybooks, here

* like me

Christine had put her finger on the pulse of cinema. What matters is who it allows – or rather invites – you to be. Christine refused the ...

Marshalsea de nos jours

Debtor’s prisons are supposed to be illegal in the United States but today poor people who fail to pay even small criminal justice fees are...

Berlin stories

Anna Winger is launching a one-hour programme of Berlin Stories for NPR; the first episode aired yesterday.  I was one of the people she int...

Anne Tyler

She went on to study Russian at Columbia, because "that was one of the most outrageous things you could do in America in the 1950s...

Temple Grandin, Haruki Murakami...

My Norwegian editor, Birgit Bjerk, once told me about the time Temple Grandin came to Oslo. Grandin has Asperger's syndrome; she sent Bi...

bookseseses

A London book market founded by independent booksellers is to launch in Hackney, selling new and second-hand titles. Goldsmith Row Book Ma...

Siu Kam Wen

¿QUÉ SIGNIFICA PARA TI, UN CHINO DE PRIMERA GENERACIÓN, ESCRIBIR EN ESPAÑOL? ¿HAS INTENTADO HACERLO EN CANTONÉS O EN MANDARÍN? Comencé a...

who ARE these people?

Erm, I do have a Mac, but erm . . . Look, if Steve Jobs had happened to audit a course in Ancient Greek or Arabic or Hebrew or Japanese or C...

talks about talks

The point of academic talk is to try to persuade your audience to agree with you about your research. This means that you need to raise a s...

ultimi Australi

3) Related: No tipping . Yes, some people expect and offer tips in Australia, but that's the exception rather than the degrading-to-al...

die fetten Jahre sind vorbei

I had NO IDEA until I read it in the Times that writers had stopped keeping blogs!! Three or four years ago—that’s just when I started blo...

felicific calculus smbc

stupid games

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. T...

[it's 3.32]

Meg Wollitzer has a piece in the NYT about the rules of literary fiction for men and women.   I really don't pay enough attention to wh...

bad science

You write – “First of all it is so good to hear you are doing well!” As you have made no effort to find out the truth for yourself, and as ...

losing streak

The Khan Academy has just got rid of its popular streak metric.  I woke up this morning in a somewhat ratty frame of mind and decided to soo...

Peafowl

I was going through my papers and came across notes from Peafowl, their conservation, breeding and management by T P Gardiner of the World ...