Spe Salvi
A colleague, staring at the Pope’s latest encyclical, remarked, “There’s no news...
Dec 1st
Judas
Amid much publicity last year, the National Geographic Society announced that a lost 3rd-century...
Dec 1st
NYT: It seems to me that the impulse to atone is a religious one, and yet you are a self-declared atheist.
Ian McEwan: Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.
NYT: Not necessarily. Faith in itself is not easy to sustain.
McEwan: Well, we won’t get into that.
Ian McEwan: Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.
NYT: Not necessarily. Faith in itself is not easy to sustain.
McEwan: Well, we won’t get into that.
Dec 1st
that decade
The contemporary consensus is clear. The seventies were awful. The important things were awful, and...
Dec 1st
word
On Monday November 19th, Amazon released something called Kindle, the latest “e-book” reading...
Nov 29th
Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for Y. Z."
Never forget that you are a son of the King. — Martin Buber A year after your death, dear Y.Z., I...
Nov 28th
are e-books books?
As I admitted in our recent Thanksgiving article, I love next-generation display technologies like...
Nov 27th
“From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I...”
— Groucho Marx
— Groucho Marx
Nov 27th
“MySpace for me is much more of a media platform, and it’s a...”
— Peter Levinsohn [here]
— Peter Levinsohn [here]
Nov 27th
no, really, I'm sorry
We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to...
Nov 27th
mind your own stupid gap
Emma Clarke, a 36-year-old voice-over specialist whose recorded warning to “mind the gap” is...
Nov 27th
is Michael Gerson a conservative?
As the world understood the term conservative in, say, 1965, Gerson isn’t one. Like many...
Nov 26th
an outsider's view of the Anglican . . ....
I’ve not been at the party that long but a clear pattern is emerging. Every week I read about more...
Nov 26th
James Wood on Tolstoy
The adjustment of vision forced on us by the condemned man, or even the children riding to Moscow,...
Nov 26th
on the new Shorter OED
Once description trumps prescription and currency eclipses timelessness, it becomes difficult to...
Nov 26th
he's not there
It occurred to me while watching I’m Not There how much we associate Dylan with the concept of...
Nov 25th
"damaging allegations"? that's one way...
Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life...
Nov 23rd
“We are easy to manage, a gregarious people / Full of...”
— Robinson Jeffers
— Robinson Jeffers
Nov 22nd
Homer and violence
There is an ancient tradition that Hesiod and Homer once competed for a poetry prize. A surviving...
Nov 22nd
my thoughts are here
Nov 21st
Stephen Fry on American and British...
We must begin with a few round truths about myself: when I get into a debate I can get very, very...
Nov 21st
restored (possibly over-restored) photo of a French nuclear...
Nov 21st
yikes
LONDON (AP) — This was a bug you couldn’t swat and definitely couldn’t step on....
Nov 21st
and a little more
SCENE: Lucrezia’s Laboratory. Retorts, test-tubes, etc. On small Renaissance table, up c., is...
Nov 21st
from Max Beerbohm's Savonarola Brown
[Enter the PORTER.] PORTER. O my dear Mistress, there is one below Demanding to have instant word...
Nov 21st
o damnable arrogance
Our task seemed simple enough at the start, as with Herculean strides we reached and surpassed every...
Nov 21st
web designs and typefaces
Great web designs are like great typefaces: some, like Rosewood, impose a personality on whatever...
Nov 21st
Rolling Stone: When you coined the word "cyberspace," did you envision that the term might be your lasting legacy?
William Gibson: Not at all. I thought the book would be despised to the extent that it wasn't ignored. Now, on a good day, my career seems so utterly unlikely that I wonder if I'm not about to snap out of a DMT blackout and discover that I'm not actually a famous writer of William Gibson novels but that I'm working at a used-book shop that smells of cat pee and drinking beer out of a cracked coffee mug
William Gibson: Not at all. I thought the book would be despised to the extent that it wasn't ignored. Now, on a good day, my career seems so utterly unlikely that I wonder if I'm not about to snap out of a DMT blackout and discover that I'm not actually a famous writer of William Gibson novels but that I'm working at a used-book shop that smells of cat pee and drinking beer out of a cracked coffee mug
Nov 20th
kindling
After chewing it over all day, I’ve concluded that Amazon’s Kindle is going to flop. Or at least I...
Nov 20th
online behavior
After being described a few weeks ago as “a self-lobotomised liberal who can’t face the...
Nov 19th
Paul Klee, “Twittering Machine” (1922)
Nov 19th
the (false) story of our ruined sleep
The story of our ruined sleep, in virtually every telling I’ve heard, begins with Thomas Edison:...
Nov 17th
the ego's last stand
I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were...
Nov 17th
the incredible Condiment Packet Gallery
Nov 17th
Stoppard on Syd Barrett
And also between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, in another part of the wood, at some...
Nov 16th
the writer's responsibilities
In my squandered youth I was a friend of Ian Hamilton, the biographer of Robert Lowell and J. D....
Nov 16th
McCain on torture
“One of the things that kept us going when I was in prison in North Vietnam was that we knew that if...
Nov 16th
the bitter, brutal tone of American...
How do we account for the bitter, brutal tone of American politics? The answer lies mainly with the...
Nov 15th
ecumenism and convergence
The principal instrument of ecumenism over the past half century has been a series of theological...
Nov 15th
creepy digitized actors
It’s kind of perfect that Mr. Malkovich deigned to be digitized for this movie. In “Being John...
Nov 15th
Nov 15th
Blendie
Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own....
Nov 15th
nostalgia for email
The sense of loss I feel about the decline of e-mail has less to do with how we communicate than...
Nov 14th
via Bibliodyssey
Nov 13th
a childhood with Asperger's
A brown carton in my basement contains most of the surviving documents of my childhood, and they...
Nov 13th
the suicide bomber of Halo 3
Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid...
Nov 12th
super-severe ADD
I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer....
Nov 12th
once a famous novelist
Recently I observed to a passing tape recorder that I was once a famous novelist. When assured,...
Nov 11th
all about the boomers
On a certain level, Lions to Lambs isn’t really about the war on terrorism at all; it’s...
Nov 10th
“When Nathan Englander, whose prize-winning short stories...”
— NYT
— NYT
Nov 9th
atheism is the true friend of egotism
Bush has been very good to atheism. Compared to the obscurantism that is the doctrine of this...
Nov 9th
Local Boy Trapped in Family
HARRISONBURG, VA—Rescue workers and concerned neighbors gathered Saturday outside the Conklin...
Nov 9th
We’re All Going to Hell [Jessica Hagy, Indexed]
Nov 8th
my thoughts on Kahlil Gibran
Nov 8th
my 2000 interview with Ken Myers about Philip...
Nov 8th
Linzie Hunter’s spam subject-line hand-lettering
Nov 8th
taking the priestly role seriously
A priest from Boston has been charged with stalking and harassing the talk show host Conan O’Brien,...
Nov 8th
criminal profiling
We are now so familiar with crime stories told through the eyes of the profiler that it is easy to...
Nov 7th
Joshua Foer, memory champion
A couple years ago, I wrote an article about a bizarre competition called the USA Memory...
Nov 7th
“The imbecile who sits beside us on the train doing financial...”
— Umberto Eco
— Umberto Eco
Nov 6th
the crimes of God
I, the undersigned Pavel M, currently jailed at Timisoara Penitentiary serving a 20 years sentence...
Nov 6th
from Bono's Rolling Stone interview
I told Paul Wolfowitz, all of them, to go ask the British army what it’s like to stand on...
Nov 5th
copying
We live in a century in which copying is only going to get easier. It’s the 21st century,...
Nov 4th
Nabokov on reading
Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an...
Nov 4th
the colonization of silence
The colonization of silence is complete. Its progress was so gradual that even those who watched it...
Nov 3rd
I love Twitter, but this . . .
One highly connected user of Twitter, Chris Messina, a consultant to businesses and nonprofit groups...
Nov 3rd
Watch
Tinawaren (a documentary; about 18 minutes)
Nov 3rd
John Updike on literary biography
Perhaps only writers are interested in the details of craft, and how others manage the cunning...
Nov 3rd
Listen
The History of Life through Time, by Wesley Jacobs (age 7; October 8, 1999)
Nov 1st
was Mozart unavailable?
Harnessing the electrical and mechanical properties of the carbon nanotube, a team of researchers...
Nov 1st