block stacking
Dec 31st
obituary for an obituarist
Hugh Massingberd, a celebrated former obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London who made a...
Dec 30th
the headstone of Rod Dreher’s Uncle Murphy
Dec 30th
London City Hall, by Fraser Speirs
Dec 29th
Robert Lowell, "After the Surprising...
September twenty-second, Sir: today I answer. In the latter part of May, Hard on our Lord’s...
Dec 29th
forgiveness
[Charles] Griswold tells us much about forgiveness, about the mental processes involved in it, and...
Dec 28th
a Firefox developer on the imminent...
Here’s a perfect example of how we knew Netscape just wasn’t going to be able to make a...
Dec 28th
orphaned objects and amateur sleuths
The internet makes each of us an amateur sleuth. There are lots of resources out there. The fact...
Dec 28th
from a nice Tufte-esque article on what makes a good chart....
Dec 27th
Henri Cartier-Bresson, from this exhibition at the Tate...
Dec 26th
the Next Big Thing in word processing! Web...
Dec 26th
on teaching literature at West Point
Out of class, they keep at it. Lieutenants in Iraq who took [Elizabeth Samet’s] course three...
Dec 26th
W. H. Auden, "At the Manger"
Mary Oh shut your bright eyes that mine must endanger With their watchfulness: protected by its...
Dec 24th
"The door of Jesus’s stable is open"
We still have this half-buried conviction that church is a place where, at least at this time of...
Dec 24th
decorating graves for Christmas; story here
Dec 23rd
Catholic England
Roman Catholics have overtaken Anglicans as the country’s dominant religious group. More...
Dec 22nd
Malcolm at six months
Dec 22nd
philosophers behaving . . . like...
It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me...
Dec 22nd
Ron Paul, milk, and coins
Paul never outshines his message, which is unchanging: Let adults make their own choices; liberty...
Dec 21st
Robert Alter's psalms
There is just one exception to Alter’s estranging and secularizing program, and it is a highly...
Dec 20th
Bea Miles (1902-1973)
Well-known in Sydney, she could be seen about city and suburban public transport wearing a green...
Dec 20th
via Bibliodyssey
Dec 20th
Once you get over the initial reluctance to put a human head...
Dec 20th
Starbucked
By 1923, [Samuel Cate] Prescott [of M.I.T.] had zeroed in on perfection; his virtuosic...
Dec 20th
Blade Runner, the Platonic cut
Pontifical dialogue aside, Blade Runner remains what is always was, an extraordinary and enduring...
Dec 20th
one of the top ten astronomy photographs of 2007
Dec 19th
the 3:10 to Pelargir
Well, yes, there are interesting tales to be told in the bridge years between the Battle of Five...
Dec 19th
Les Murray, "The Quality of Sprawl"
Sprawl is the quality of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a farm utility truck, and sprawl...
Dec 19th
ohmygoodness ohmygoodness ohmy o o o
ACADEMY AWARD-WINNER PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT,”...
Dec 18th
the decline of reading
There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some...
Dec 18th
Noah’s Ark, as seen via Google Earth [here]
Dec 17th
J. M. Coetzee, Australian citizen
Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave?...
Dec 15th
via Strange Maps
Dec 15th
more Beckerman
Dec 14th
Dave Beckerman
Dec 14th
Rowan Williams's Advent hope
A great deal of the language that is around in the Communion at present seems to presuppose that any...
Dec 14th
religious tests
This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the...
Dec 14th
fabulous account of Pixar films' referring to...
Dec 13th
Watch
I’ve never really gotten over this song. (I’ll re-establish my hipster cred some other...
Dec 12th
the entire manuscript of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque...
Dec 11th
Al Gore meets the Klingon ambassador. Awesome. [via Fake...
Dec 11th
intelligence
The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used...
Dec 11th
[Indexed]
Dec 10th
history is bunk
Appearing on National Public Radio’s quiz show, “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell...
Dec 10th
a word from your host
This tumblelog will be on hiatus for a few days while its onlie begetter pays a visit to Noo Yawk...
Dec 5th
Vista de la Biblioteca Vasconcelos, here
Dec 4th
knitting the raveled sleeve of care
Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified...
Dec 4th
three lectures by my friend Carlos Eire: "A...
Dec 4th
'I think I am a missing person'
A man who walked into a police station five years after he was presumed dead in a canoeing accident...
Dec 3rd
Auden on criticism
Criticism is tradition defending itself against the three armies of the Goddess Stupidity: the army...
Dec 3rd
Margaret Atwood on Huxley
How does [Brave New World] stand up, 75 years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to...
Dec 2nd
Boston Globe Ideas: During this tour, you often left airports on foot, is that right?
Will Self: Yes. I walked from Pearson Airport to downtown Toronto....I also walked from [the LA airport] to Watts on the night of Halloween. And I walked from O'Hare some of the way into Chicago. You can't get out of the Chicago airport directly, so I took the subway to the first stop, and then I walked five minutes and I was standing on a riverbank looking a deer in the face at twilight. That was the kind of moment of the modern sublime that I'm aiming for. Plane after plane flying above me, a hundred feet over my head, while I was in this bucolic setting. And then I walked to the nearest Wal-Mart 7 miles away.
Ideas: What were you after in Wal-Mart?
Self: Some socks. . . .
Ideas: What were you hoping you'd experience on your book-tour walkabout?
Self: I'm interested in orientation. I've been traveling around the States on author tours for 15 tours now. A lot of these North American cities I've been in and out of numerous times, but I never knew where I was. That's an abuse of me and an abuse of the city, to reduce it to an assemblage of cab rides, bookstores, encounters with journalists, barrooms, and then back to the airport. These walks allowed me to reclaim these cities.
Ideas: So it's a way of mapping territory in your head?
Self: Yes, just like a migratory bird does. I told a friend that I'd walked out of O'Hare and he grimaced and he said, "That must be awful." But he doesn't know what's outside of O'Hare. There's an enormous swath of countryside. My [walking] practice wins back this bucolia.
Will Self: Yes. I walked from Pearson Airport to downtown Toronto....I also walked from [the LA airport] to Watts on the night of Halloween. And I walked from O'Hare some of the way into Chicago. You can't get out of the Chicago airport directly, so I took the subway to the first stop, and then I walked five minutes and I was standing on a riverbank looking a deer in the face at twilight. That was the kind of moment of the modern sublime that I'm aiming for. Plane after plane flying above me, a hundred feet over my head, while I was in this bucolic setting. And then I walked to the nearest Wal-Mart 7 miles away.
Ideas: What were you after in Wal-Mart?
Self: Some socks. . . .
Ideas: What were you hoping you'd experience on your book-tour walkabout?
Self: I'm interested in orientation. I've been traveling around the States on author tours for 15 tours now. A lot of these North American cities I've been in and out of numerous times, but I never knew where I was. That's an abuse of me and an abuse of the city, to reduce it to an assemblage of cab rides, bookstores, encounters with journalists, barrooms, and then back to the airport. These walks allowed me to reclaim these cities.
Ideas: So it's a way of mapping territory in your head?
Self: Yes, just like a migratory bird does. I told a friend that I'd walked out of O'Hare and he grimaced and he said, "That must be awful." But he doesn't know what's outside of O'Hare. There's an enormous swath of countryside. My [walking] practice wins back this bucolia.
Dec 2nd
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