At Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen plumps for linking, not thinking: Glenn [Reynolds] is so successful because he understands the idea of blogs as portals. (This is my view, not Glenn’s own self-description.) Blogs that offer too much of the author, and the author alone, are vulnerable to other blogs that cream-skim them, and other blogs, [...]

Literary criticism turns up in odd places. I’ve been waiting to have my say about Tolstoy, that youthful rake turned pious old fraud, only to find that the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, in his curious novel Mysteries, beat me to it by a century. His main character, Nagel, gets drunk and begins to rant: To [...]

Computers may or may not be changing the nature of art; I leave this question to the eminent Blowhards. But at the very least they could be the handmaidens of literary scholarship. Shouldn’t the Internet be full of concordances by now? You remember concordances. Those thick books your English professors had on their shelves, where [...]

Erin O’Connor favorably cites this piece from the poet Tom Henihan, slagging poetry workshops. Henihan writes: The teaching of poetry has become epidemic. The question of having the “gift” never comes up; the assumption being that poetry can be acquired like everything else. I have to say that the poets who head up these little [...]

Warning: Spoilers ahead. A group of American fourth-graders, led by perky Scarlett Johansson, travels to Tokyo to participate in an international karaoke contest. Jack Black turns in a feral performance as their coach, exhorting them to “stick it to Japan.” Bill Murray plays a wealthy ex-karaoke star who has lost all interest in karaoke and [...]

Congratulations, to begin with, to all Red Sox and Cubs fans, who burnished their reputations as lovable losers, with their teams both snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in dramatic fashion. There is a lesson for them in the plight of the Rangers fan. For decades New York Rangers fans had to endure the [...]

My old friend and frequent critic Michael Krantz, taking exception to my criticism of Quentin Tarantino, writes as follows: Tarantino seems to inspire strong visceral reactions of both kinds, which to my mind is at least somewhat [sic] of a compliment (who bothers arguing about most movies?). I don’t wish to pick on Michael particularly; [...]

Megan is now posting cheesecake. See Megan’s cheesecake. Note in particular the artistic frame of matching Diet Coke cans, and the grimy mouse, bottom right.

Quentin Tarantino watches a whole lot of movies, to considerable purpose, as most of the best bits in his own movies are lifted from other people’s. Pulp Fiction‘s “cleaner” sequence plagiarizes, down to the name, the one from La Femme Nikita. It even uses Harvey Keitel, who played the same part in Point of No [...]

(I had a pleasant holiday from you, dear readers, and, I trust, you from me as well. Now let’s get down to it boppers.) Toxicologists say that the dose is the poison, and Americans could save themselves millions of dollars if they only understood what that means. Everything on earth, from arsenic to mother’s milk, [...]