Malcolm at seven months
Jan 31st
"I just make it up"
Acclaimed, iconoclastic biographer Diane Middlebrook died Saturday, Dec. 15, in San Francisco of...
Jan 30th
Watch
“Underwater Astonishments”
Jan 29th
the announcement we've all been waiting...
CHARLESTON, SC — After spending two months accompanying his wife, Hillary, on the campaign trail,...
Jan 29th
"Endnotes" (a short story by Gregory...
Jan 29th
Jan 29th
on Jonny Greenwood's score for "There...
There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score....
Jan 29th
reparations for the Beatles
“We would like to take this opportunity to rectify a historic missed opportunity which...
Jan 29th
Jan 28th
Jacob Carter, from the “River Thames” series...
Jan 28th
today is the fiftieth anniversary of the...
Jan 28th
“Multitasking, a definition: ‘The attempt by human...”
— Walter Kirn
— Walter Kirn
Jan 28th
Steam Insect, by Christopher Conte
Jan 28th
Benjamin's miniaturism
To explore the submerged cultures of Berlin or Paris, [Walter] Benjamin had to cram a library in his...
Jan 26th
smells like . . .
A prize-winning novelist has won a settlement of more than £100,000 after she claimed to have...
Jan 26th
Douglas Coupland, “Royalties,” one dollar bills and witch...
Jan 25th
Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas is now...
Jan 25th
the Clover
A professionwide interest in brewed coffee has driven the stealth spread of the Clover. Introduced...
Jan 24th
"He doesn't preach religion."
Jennifer Lee, a 23-year-old teacher’s assistant for autistic children in New York City, watches...
Jan 24th
griefers
Griefing, as a term, dates to the late 1990s, when it was used to describe the willfully antisocial...
Jan 23rd
a few thoughts on There Will Be Blood
Jan 23rd
the Mythbusters: liberal arts poster children
Jan 23rd
more proof that everyone oughta be tweetin'
Jan 21st
well-designed business cards
Jan 21st
a few thoughts on my home town and Dr. King
Jan 21st
Family Boat Dining Café: we serve all our...
Jan 20th
merely a "document"
Working as a journalist in his mid-20s, Wiesel wrote the first version of “Night” in Yiddish as “Und...
Jan 19th
the pathology of shyness
[Christopher] Lane writes: ‘Beginning in 1980, with much fanfare and confidence in its revised...
Jan 19th
Vikram Seth and George Herbert's house
When I was seventeen or so, I came to England (from India) to do my A-levels in physics and...
Jan 18th
A. E. Housman on the causes of obscurity...
When the meaning of a poem is obscure, it is due to one of three causes. Either the author through...
Jan 17th
Cloverfield
In a quote from the press notes, Abrams says, “We live in a time of great fear. Having a movie...
Jan 17th
there must be clowns?
LONDON - Bad news for Coco and Blinko — children don’t like clowns, and even older kids are...
Jan 16th
via Hoefler and Frere-Jones
Jan 16th
Karl Barth, donkey
With horror I read [a] statement that I was the greatest theologian of the century. That really...
Jan 16th
Spengler on textual criticism of the...
The Muslim world will continue to treat Koranic criticism as an existential risk, and apply whatever...
Jan 14th
Caitlin Flanagan on Katie Couric
That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the...
Jan 14th
nothing more
[Caitlin] Flanagan says that Juno is a “fairy tale” because, “As any woman who has...
Jan 14th
honoring your mothers and fathers
To my mind the whole question of tradition falls under the Fifth Commandment: Honour father and...
Jan 14th
concert poster as ‘60’s paperback (via...
Jan 14th
studying the meaning of life (or not)
In the past few weeks, tens of thousands of young men and women have begun their college careers....
Jan 13th
human value and literary value
In the second of the essays here, ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’, Amis argues that one...
Jan 12th
what an electronic reading device should...
Please don’t imagine that I’m one of those muttering diehards who exhibit an irrational fetish for...
Jan 11th
fun & games with trains
A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train...
Jan 11th
Sean Dodson's ten favorite bookshops in the...
Jan 11th
evidence that your grades depend on the font...
Jan 10th
J. K. Rowling versus the Harry Potter...
Unlike a Potter film or computer game, the authors of the Lexicon encyclopedia are not simply moving...
Jan 10th
"the best way to avoid dying"
Having a pint of beer after a game of football or going to the gym could be the key to a long,...
Jan 8th
compression
Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys’ debut, the band...
Jan 8th
“It’s easy being President, Lisa! You just point the...”
— Homer Simpson
— Homer Simpson
Jan 8th
Nicholar Carr, optimist (via Wired)
Wired: What happened to privacy worries?Carr: People say they're nervous about storing personal info online, but they do it all the time, sacrificing privacy to save time and money. Companies are no different. The two most popular Web-based business applications right now are for managing payroll and customer accounts — some of the most sensitive information companies have.
Wired: What's left for PCs?
Carr: They're turning into network terminals.
Wired: Just like Sun Microsystems' old mantra, "The network is the computer"?
Carr: It's no coincidence that Google CEO Eric Schmidt cut his teeth there. Google is fulfilling the destiny that Sun sketched out.
Wired: But a single global system?
Carr: I used to think we'd end up with something dynamic and heterogeneous — many companies loosely joined. But we're already seeing a great deal of consolidation by companies like Google and Microsoft. We'll probably see some kind of oligopoly, with standards that allow the movement of data among the utilities similar to the way current moves through the electric grid.
Wired: What happened to the Web undermining institutions and empowering individuals?
Carr: Computers are technologies of liberation, but they're also technologies of control. It's great that everyone is empowered to write blogs, upload videos to YouTube, and promote themselves on Facebook. But as systems become more centralized — as personal data becomes more exposed and data-mining software grows in sophistication — the interests of control will gain the upper hand. If you're looking to monitor and manipulate people, you couldn't design a better machine.
Wired: So it's Google über alles?
Carr: Yeah. Welcome to Google Earth. A bunch of bright computer scientists and AI experts in Silicon Valley are not only rewiring our computers — they're dictating the future terms of our culture. It's terrifying.
Jan 8th
Will the Humanities Save Us?
Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the...
Jan 7th
Sharon Olds, "Sex without Love"
How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each...
Jan 7th
“The status quo is yesterday. And change is tomorrow. And...”
— Presidential candidate John...
— Presidential candidate John...
Jan 5th
the people who manage every phone number...
A. When NeuStar first took on the responsibility for managing the telephone number system back in 1997 and 1998, the first thing we did was calculate how many telephone numbers were available against the demand. Our first calculation said that at the then rates of use of telephone numbers, we’d run out of 10-digit telephone numbers by, interestingly, 2008. The solution to this challenge was a trillion-dollar fix. What was initially proposed was extending the telephone number from 10 digits to 13 or 14 digits. If that happened, every device that touched the network including answering machines and fax machines would have to be fundamentally changed. It was going to be the mother of all Y2K problems.Q. So what happened?
A. NeuStar sent our engineers into a locked conference room, and we didn’t let them out until they came back with a better solution. It was a number pooling system that we proposed to the industry and the Federal Communications Commission. It was mandated by the F.C.C. so that all telephone companies must adhere to it. As a result, the life of the 10-digit telephone number system now extends beyond 2030 or 2035.
Q. What’s the concept of pooling in a nutshell?
A. It used to be when a telephone company needed a number, the smallest block of numbers we could give them was 10,000 numbers, or the equivalent of an entire local exchange. If you were a telephone company and had a single customer in a town, you’d come to me and I’d have to give you an area code, say 422, and all 10,000 numbers that come with that. But we used an advanced technology in the routing database and, for the first time, were able to allocate blocks of 1,000 telephone numbers.
Q. So it was your company that was involved in deciding that some people in Manhattan could not have 212 numbers but instead had to have 646 area codes?
A. I knew that NeuStar was playing an important role in the industry when I saw there was a “Seinfeld” episode on exactly that problem. The fact is, there are only so many telephone numbers associated with any one area code. So with the explosive growth in the number of telephones and network endpoints, there’s been a huge demand, and area codes have been altered. What’s a fascinating twist on this, it used to be that when you dialed a 212 area code number, you knew you were dialing a telephone number on the island of Manhattan. Now with the coming of voice over the Internet, VoIP, you can dial a 212 telephone number and have the number ring a phone in Buenos Aires or Moscow. The significance of telephone numbers has changed. The system is becoming much more complex and increasingly requires the routing capability of the central directory that NeuStar manages on behalf of all networks.
Jan 5th
rational choice economics at work
I had been trying to lose 10 pounds for what seemed like a decade. I had lost about 378 pounds...
Jan 5th
Michael Pollan's Twelve Commandments for...
1. Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. 2. Avoid foods...
Jan 4th
Luggage label for Ansett Airways Ltd., circa 1935 (via...
Jan 3rd
Louise Bourgeois and one of her sculptures, from here
Jan 3rd
story here
Jan 2nd
Questville
Amazon’s Questville, set for a late 2008 release, is a spinoff of the company’s Askville, a...
Jan 2nd
the sexy robots in our future
Levy simply embraces the sexy robots in our future, whether they are a sensitive cybermale or an...
Jan 2nd
“Depp’s Sweeney comes across as one more mournful Burton...”
— Anthony Lane on Sweeney Todd
— Anthony Lane on Sweeney Todd
Jan 1st
an image for the New Year: Roller-coaster by Ilkka Halso...
Jan 1st