There are a lot of books I look forward to reading, and even a few I look forward to re-reading. Among that smaller, second set is Swann’s Way, the first book of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, The Search for Lost Time, better known but perhaps worse translated as A Remembrance of Things [...]
It’s been a while since I got anything into a newspaper. But I helped out a friend at the Asahi Shimbun last week with a little transcription and editing of an interview with Michael Sandel, which appeared in last Sunday’s edition. Sandel is a professor of political philosophy at Harvard. You may have caught his [...]
Why? Because he wrote a very similar piece a while back. You can read it here: The Toiletization of the West Both Shane Bauer’s and today’s piece by Daniel Lametti in Slate share many of the same ideas: the Sikirov research, the first-world/third-world toilet divide, the physiological contortions spurred by modern toiletry, and of course [...]
1969+clever teenager+John Lennon+reel-to-reel audio tape = Oscar nominated short film. Go to the Youtube site for a high-res version.
Kaplan has a worthy review of Donald Rumsfeld’s strategic legacy in the Atlantic. I’ll comment more on it later. But for now, a provocative point that Kaplan introduces in the piece’s lede: In 1962, a Harvard economics professor named Thomas C. Schelling wrote an introduction to Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. In a [...]
Just learned about the Stroop effect. You can experience it for yourself using this quick test from the Stroop effect Wikipedia page: Say aloud the colors of each of these words, as fast as you can: Green Red Blue Yellow Blue Yellow Blue Yellow Red Green Yellow Green If naming the first group of colors [...]
Making the rounds online, for good reason. I’ll have more content up soon, I hope.
Grace Paley died two days ago. She was a sweet and humane poet and short story writer, one of those individuals for whom many will admit a familiarity with the name if not a specific knowledge of the work because some high school English teacher somewhere along the line (but a fan, truly) assigned a [...]
Ran across an interesting ad on the New York Times‘s home page today: (Note, the image is a composite of two screenshots as my screen is quite small.) So. Save Dartmouth. I must have misunderstood that the ruckus over Dartmouth’s alumni constitution and its system of having alumni vote for half the Board of Trustees [...]
Last week, the Guardian reported that the British government is creating a “radical plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions by rationing the carbon use of individuals.” The plan includes what sounds to be a debit card, in which every citizen is allocated an annual carbon allowance. Writes David Adam: …Points would be deducted at point [...]
No problem. Let me know if you have any questions. 
