April 17, 2007
What Happened at Virginia Tech
Perhaps I should remain decently silent about the terrible shootings yesterday at Virginia Tech. Perhaps it is something foolish in me feeling prompted to write concerning these events. After all, […]
April 17, 2007
Short Takes
I heard a rumor that Orwell wrote 1984 after working at the BBC. Confirm? (via Syntax of Things) Bolano excerpt here, and more info here. Blah blah blah Pulitzers. The […]
April 17, 2007
Poetry and Politics
In the course of a reading that she gave at Lewis & Clark College, the poet Judith Barrington expressed chagrin at American intellectuals’ debates about the appropriateness of engaging with […]
April 16, 2007
Short Takes
Where’s Brooklyn? (via After the MFA) “In an interview she gave to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung after receiving the Nobel Prize, Jelinek said that until then, she had written against […]
April 13, 2007
Short Takes
OH MY GOD WHAT IS WITH THE SQUIRREL SUIT? (original version of the verse here–special thanks to Anne for bringing this to my attention!) “While Jonathan Swift’s satirical writing has […]
April 12, 2007
One Year Later: AP Photographer Still Held By US
Where’s the outrage? NEW YORK One year after his arrest, an Associated Press photographer is still being held at a prison camp in Iraq by U.S. military officials who have […]
April 12, 2007
No Damn Cat, No Damn Cradle
Vonnegut is gone, and like many, I am inconsolable. His website has already been updated. Obits here, here, here, here and here. Blogosphere reactions: Books Inq, Critical Mass, Sarvas, Armavirumque, […]
April 12, 2007
Short Takes
Sargasso Sea? Roy Kesey interviews his five-year-old daughter (via Perpetual Folly) Bat Segundo takes on polygraphs and other junk science. “Would this be a good time to mention that I […]
April 11, 2007
Short Takes
“The suggestion is that something Rosenberg calls ‘the principle of natural selection’ is actually a fundamental physical law. Natural selection, according to him, is not a statistical consequence of the […]
April 10, 2007
Short Takes – The “Liz Is Sick and So This Will Be Even Shorter” Edition
It used to be that one could only judge whether a life was happy after the person living it died. This has changed. (via AL Daily) You guys! The wall […]
April 9, 2007
Short Takes
I’ve gotta give the edge to Dennett on this one, though I kind of don’t want to. Fodor is right to question evolutionary psychology, but the grounds on which he’s […]
April 6, 2007
Short Takes
A great review of a book that contains a concise history of cosmology throughout the twentieth century, for those of you who didn’t keep up. “James Patterson gets love and […]