I’ve just been listening to Damon Albarn on the radio (listen here) criticize the lineup at the Live8 concerts for being “Anglo-Saxon”: far too white and middle-class. Of course, Albarn, who has somehow transcended the limitations of his own skin pigmentation and social-economic status, will be staging his own, far cooler event: “Flight 5056.” This […]

I’m still pondering the possible implications of a report from a group of researchers from the University of Utah (see here and here) that suggests that the high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be connected to their history of persecution.Crudely stated, the premise goes something like this: European Jews’ exclusion from the ranks of the […]

Here’s an olla podrida of links to book-related articles–gleaned from many man-hours of meticulous surfing–which I thought were worth sharing:Starting on a note of unrelenting gravitas, we have Fintan O’Toole’s appreciation of John Banville’s latest novel, The Sea, in Prospect. There may not be a lot of yucks in O’Toole’s writing but he’s still one […]

There’s an excellent essay in the New York Times by the esteemed Milton critic and putative model for Morris Zapp in some of David Lodge’s novels, Stanley Fish. Fish lays out his idiosyncratic approach to teaching:”On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into […]

My recent (relatively) stellar performance in posting every day came to an end this week as the small matter of work got in the way. As well as trying to maintain a trickle of income coming in from mundane sources (the mortgage’s thirst is never slaked), I’m tricking around trying to get a blog tool […]

I have a bad feeling that this is not a spoof: Das Keyboard (via Blogdex)

Chancellor Schr�der’s decision to call early elections came in the wake of disastrous election results in North Rhine-Westphalia. Apparently, the electorate gave the Social Democratic Party a kicking because they don’t like the government’s fairly timid attempts to reform the economy (in particular the so-called Hartz IV reforms, which introduced cuts to unemployment and social […]

Walter Kirn reviews Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad Is Good for You” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review today. Johnson’s book is attracting quite a lot of coverage for making the apparently counter-intuitive proposal that watching a lot of television or playing a lot of video games is actually a Good Thing. Apparently, the […]

Here’s two examples of well-crafted bile from the week worth noting in the blog:The British MP George Galloway may be a shady ego-manic, but he can hurl a great, almost baroque, insult. From the Gruaniad, which describes an exchange before Galloway proceeded to demolish a Senate committee ostensibly convened to grill the Scot on alleged […]

Just finished Brian Fagan�s The Long Summer, whose subtitle �How Climate Changed Civilization� sums up the book�s premise. Specifically, Fagan describes the coincidence of the rise of human civilization in about the last 15,000 years with a period of unusual warmth and climactic stability in the millennia after the end of the last ice age. […]