and they all go marching...

Every summer, I get calls from people who are puzzled to find a heap of dead Argentine ants in their freezer. The ants are attracted to some...

The real explosion in customized derivatives came in the aughts, and in particular, after 2005. Why after 2005? There are a couple of theori...

i am not a number

Bruce Falconer on a German torture colony in Chile, ht MR.

get thee behind me tolkien

Magical thinking isn’t fantasy in the literary sense. It is a fantasy, in the psychoanalytic sense: a dream of a world where actions don’t h...

At the Casual Optimist, Q&A with Ferrán Lopez, book designer for Random House Mondadori

100 best Arabic books

Courtesy Marginal Revolution , a link to M. Lynx Qualey's blog Arabic Literature in English, which has posted an annotated translation o...

continent cut off

Mark Liberman discusses 'beg the question' on Language Log. A commenter chips in. As to whether 'begs the question' is an a...