occasionally

Hamm’s mellifluous reading is ‘beautiful’ and ‘poetic’, but his resonant, plush voice and carefully modulated phrasing is also straightening...

Bunkers, cellulose, get thee behind me Internet

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame is frittering away his time on Twitter instead of doing the decent thing, i.e. posting on his blog. SHAME, ...

loosely based on...

INTERVIEWER Do people in your books ever come up to you and say, I recognize myself? AUCHINCLOSS They certainly do, but they’re usually so f...

Yes or No?

My proposal went something like this: "It looks as if we are going to lose the war, and if it comes to the point of the Honorable Death...

Eat this chair!

[Kurosawa has to undergo a directing test upon completion of Sugata Sanshiro; the examiners include the censors of the Ministry of the Inter...

mono-no-aware

Rereading Kurosawa's Autobiography. (re editing Uma [Horses]): There is one place in the story where a foal has been sold and the mare f...

motivation

Thinking of applying for a residency in France. They want a 'letter of motivation'. I look around online and find a site with 50 exa...

lexicity

 Through the incomparable Languagehat , I discover that there is a new website, Lexicity , with resources for learning a wide range of ancie...

missed it by that much

It turns out that while FedEx will gladly offer to let you pay 4x over what you otherwise would, they’ll still group your separate package...

wie immer

Increasingly, restaurants are recording whether you are a regular, a first-timer, someone who lives close by or a friend of the owner or m...

Sublet in Berlin

I am looking to sublet my apartment in Berlin from October 1 for 5 months or longer.  Pictures and details here . The rent is €600 a month i...

only one

Why does no one send ME these witty rejection letters?  Publisher to Gertrude Stein, here .

The Spanish men’s intellectual disability basketball team was stripped of its gold medal after it emerged that many of its members  were not...

that clinking clanking sound

Weird piece in NYT on private schools. Though expensive ($40,000 or so a year), they can't cover their costs by tuition -- donations mu...

take that!

The site is simple to use, just sign in with Twitter via Oauth and then your off. Once logged in you can do the following tasks. You can m...

taking responsibilities seriously

I'm reading Gordon Leff's Heresy in the Later Middle Ages.  The phenomena described are terrifyingly familiar - the malaise which af...

always the last to know

Reading an interview of Christopher Tolkien which appeared in le Monde last month. French readers, it seems, meet Bilbo and Frodo Baggins o...

either either

"You've no idea how much email I get telling me how wrong every single thing in the book is. There are a lot of very specific thin...

A-Y

Every oral-sex seminar, “every masturbation how-to session, every tip I heard on how to stimulate the anus — each of these seemed to be mock...

over there

Part of a series begun in World War II for American GIs going abroad, A Pocket Guide to Vietnam was intended to introduce them to the custo...