The New Yorker gives its take on the brainstorming behind devising a catchy slogan to replace “stay the course,” a phrase that, apparently, was never really mouthed by President Bush in the first place.

Is there something offensive about Borat, “Kazakhstan’s sixth most famous man” and the second comedic invention of Sacha Baron Cohen to be give celluloid treatment* ? This would seem not so much a rhetorical question as a flagrantly disingenuous one. Borat, whose persona is composed of a toxic mixture of Asperberger-lite obliviousness and charmless pushiness, […]

Regular visitors to this site will find it as radically altered as Kenny Rogers. But in this case, I believe the changes are a good thing.All the improvements can be exclusively attributed to my sister, web designer extraordinaire Catriona, who is scarily au fait with the cryptic realm of CSS files.Now, as Wilde famously remarked […]

The Complete Review reports on the arrival at their offices of the latest, and possibly last, wrist-snapping 1100-page meganovel from that PoMo giant, Thomas Pynchon. They suggest that the book Against The Day “most resembles is, indeed, Gravity’s Rainbow. But that’s just a very quick first impression: this is definitely a text it’s going to […]

Fellow Three Monkeys blog, Our Man in Gda?sk, recently commented on the state of Polish literature, focusing on the genre of “dirty realism” exemplified by the writings of Marek Nowakowski. This literary preoccupation with nostalgie de la boue is also evident in one of the more interesting recent collections of short fiction from an Irish […]

From “Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite?” in The New York Times: At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the [FBI�s] new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. �Yes, […]

Square-jawed publisher, John Ryan, the “brains” behind such consciousness-raising mags as VIP, GI (AKA Gay Ireland), and, latterly, The New York Dog, shows he’s hip to the new media zeitgeist with his latest venture, Bloggorrah. Proudly claiming to be “unfiltered and updated 10 times daily,” Bloggorah appears to be positioning itself as a Hibernian version […]

It appeared way back in the September 8 issue of the TLS, but I’ve only just read the review by Jerry A Coyne of Frederick Crews’s Follies of the Wise. Coyne applauds Crews’s skewering of contemporary fallacies–“not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of intellectual inquiry which have caused rational people to succumb […]

The canniest political elites are able to lull their subjects into experiencing what George Orwell dubbed doublethink: “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” In the contemporary political scene, a passive electorate is expected to swallow a) that the government, being a success, is naturally supported […]

How would the Sunday newspapers fill their proliferating pages if teams of university researchers did not dutifully supply them with nuggets of trivia? For instance, this weekend the Sunday Times reported that: Street names are a key indicator of social class and thus personal wealth, according to new research by Professor Richard Webber, of University […]