1.21.08

The New England Patriots, should they lose in the Super Bowl, may yet be remembered with the 1954 Cleveland Indians and the 1906 Chicago Cubs. You've never heard of them? Exactly.

A map of the United States that Tufte would appreciate. (Via EconLog.)

1.12.08

Life may be short, but everyone seems to find plenty of time to repeat himself nonetheless.

People who endorse a study that agrees with their priors without analyzing it first often look stupid.

1.07.08

I wholeheartedly support the writers' strike, as I support anything that reminds people that actors do not make up the words as they go.

For the literate: How to read and remember. For the rest of you: How to open a bottle of champagne with a sword.

The Securities and Exchange Commission — market equalizer, defender of the little guy — at work.

12.30.07

On poshlost, which Nabokov introduced to English speakers and which he limned exactly ("smug philistinism" won't do) in his book on Gogol:

Gogol, in a chance story he told, expressed the immortal spirit of poshlost pervading the German nation and expressed it with all the vigor of his genius.

The conversation around him had turned upon the subject of Germany, and after listening awhile, Gogol said, "Yes, generally speaking the average German is not too pleasant a creature, but it is impossible to imagine anything more unpleasant than a German Lothario, a German who tries to be winsome... One day in Germany I happened to run across such a gallant. The dwelling place of the maiden whom he had long been courting without success stood on the bank of some lake or other, and there she would be every evening sitting on her balcony and doing two things at once: knitting a stocking and enjoying the view. My German gallant being sick of the futility of his pursuit finally devised an unfailing means whereby to conquer the heart of his cruel Gretchen. Every evening he would take off his clothes, plunge into the lake and, as he swam there, right under the eyes of his beloved, he would keep embracing a couple of swans which had been specially prepared by him for that purpose. I do not quite know what those swans were supposed to symbolize, but I do know that for several evenings on end he did nothing but float about and assume pretty postures with his birds under that precious balcony. Perhaps he fancied there was something poetically antique and mythological in such frolics, but whatever notion he had, the result proved favorable to his intentions: the lady's heart was conquered just as he thought it would be, and soon they were happily married."

Figments of my imagination have taken to giving interviews.

12.21.07

The Frederick Taylor of Proletkult; or, why acronyms were so popular in Soviet Russia.

12.20.07

Poetic form is not a cage but a spur: a testimonial.

12.18.07

Admirable is he who,
When he sees lightning, does not say
"Life goes by in a flash."
—Basho

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.
It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves.
—Wallace Stevens, "The Course of a Particular"

12.10.07

If you missed William Langewiesche's epic article about wine critic Robert Parker seven years ago in The Atlantic, too bad: you need a subscription. This, however, is the next best thing.

"Republican Mike Huckabee believes God wants us to fight global warming. If God really wanted us to fight global warming why would he tell me to set fire to all those tires?"
—C. Van Carter

12.7.07

I am afraid to turn this item into a numbered list, lest it rip a hole in the fabric of the universe.

12.6.07

"If you want to inhibit a particular behavior, a good rule of thumb is this: Don’t give it a label that would work equally well as a band name."
—Scott Adams

Who speaks little forfeits the privilege of being ignored.

12.5.07

Never punt: lessons from Pulaski High.

Nearly all our modern conveniences date from the turn of the century. Here is a gradually gathered list that only approaches completeness. Obviously, some of the items needed improvement before finding a market:

for the home: central heating; the bathtub of modern size and shape with hot and cold running water; the safety razor; the chlorinated water supply; stainless-steel implements; the electric toaster, iron, oven, sewing machine, and dishwasher;

for the office: the electric elevator; the dial phone; wireless telegraphy; the punched-card sorting system; the portable typewriter; the coffee-vending machine;

for health: Salvarsan for syphilis; various antitoxins; radium treatment for breast cancer; heart surgery; the beginiing of organ transplant (in animals); appendectomy; the psychiatric clinic; the baby incubator; contact lenses; toothpaste in a tube;

for recreation: motion pictures; musical comedy; the gramophone; ice dancing; volleyball and basketball; the Ferris wheel; the jukebox; the newspaper headline; the cabaret song relayed by phone (in Paris); the screen kiss; and the striptease;

for food and drink: breakfast cereals; milk delivered in bottles; packaged produce (prunes); Coca-Cola; margarine; the ice cream cone; chop suey; canned fruit; chewing gum; the gin cocktail; the refrigerator; and the thermos flask;

for instruction: public libraries; the correspondence course; the syndicated article (McClure's invention); the questionnaire method; the language course on gramophone; the publisher's blurb;

for shopping: the full-range department store; the chain store; the escalator; the shopping center (Cleveland, Ohio, 1893: a four-tiered, glass-covered arcade with 112 luxury shops); the coin telephone; the traveler's check;

for law and order: fingerprinting; telephone tapping; the automatic pistol; and the electric chair;

for transportation and other needs: the automobile and the aeroplane; the city subway (underground) train; the pneumatic tire; vocal and orchestral recording; color photography; the roll film; rayon and other artificial textiles; celluloid; book matches; rubber heels; the zip fastener;

prophetic firsts: the hunger strike; women's football club; woman stockbroker; the acronym SCAPA = Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising.

—Jacques Barzun (who turned 100 last week), From Dawn to Decadence

12.4.07

The Cycle of Fashion
Indecent — 10 years before its time
Shameless — 5 years before its time
Outré — 1 year before its time
Smart —
Dowdy — 1 year after its time
Hideous — 10 years after its time
Ridiculous — 20 years after its time
Amusing — 30 years after its time
Quaint — 50 years after its time
Charming — 70 years after its time
Romantic — 100 years after its time
Beautiful — 150 years after its time
—James Laver, Taste and Fashion

"I've always thought of myself as an independent filmmaker. I live in San Francisco, while most of my colleagues live in Los Angeles..."
—Francis Ford Coppola, an object lesson in career arcs to avoid

12.3.07

"Special Instructions to [Baseball] Players," from 1898. In case you had any doubts about Deadwood.

12.2.07

"During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under $4,000 per year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing of any area in the city. That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California."
—James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature

Read carefully before investing, and remember that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

12.1.07

A list of (best of 2007) lists. (Via MR.)

Best sentence I read the day before yesterday: "A jury award for punitive damages isn't so much an economic valuation as an attitude expression — a psychophysical measure of outrage, expressed on an unbounded scale with no standard modulus." Oddly, I have never seen this argument employed in a case for capping punitive damages (i.e., supplying the modulus), and it isn't here either.

11.30.07

Steve Sailer wanted to know the real reason Trent Lott resigned. You think this had anything to do with it?

Alex Tabarrok appears to have come around to my views on marriage, not to mention my views on Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

11.29.07

Terry Teachout, an indefatigable biographer himself, has lately taken to informing us that biography is this and biography is that and biography is the other too. What biography, especially literary biography, assuredly is, when found in used bookstores, is cheaper, on a per joule basis, than firewood.

How pleasant to see bad poetry eviscerated by someone other than me. Moldbug, who is also correct that no poet of the 19th century other than Emily Dickinson is worth reading (except for a few one-offs, and Thomas Hardy), is hereby promoted to "Now."

As a method of teaching Americans geography, this beats war. (Via Volokh.)

11.28.07

Getting people to tell the truth.

If you must shop for the holiday, here's how.

11.24.07

"Together in the first days of 1848 [Marx and Engels] wrote the pamphlet that was to conquer half the world, The Communist Manifesto. It contains the quintessence of 'Marxism'; what came later was application, economic consolidation, illustration and defense, not creative development. The Manifesto is a work of immense persuasive force, simple and homogeneous, in spite of the complicated ideas which were worked into it. The first to be overwhelmed by it, to such an extent that they never had another idea, were its authors."
—Golo Mann, The History of Germany Since 1789

Two cheers, or maybe one and a half, for white nationalism.

11.23.07

Lost data disasters, modern and classic.

"Psychologists have a technical term for the rare people who are predisposed to clearly and accurately assess their achievements: depressives."
—Megan McArdle

11.21.07

Queues around the world.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the distinguished scholar of whatever it is, exactly, that he's a distinguished scholar of, proves less adept at statistics.

I preferred the mystery myself.

11.18.07

A non-existent book nearly as entertaining as, and even more useful than, Albert Goldman's proposed Encyclopedia of Musical Plagiarism.

Wouldn't calling something "must-read" discourage any self-respecting person from reading it?

David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer. Insufferably pretentious yet indubitably instructive. (Via The Debatable Land.)

11.17.07

"The spectacular collapse of traditional male dress — which had been fairly stable since the 1920s — is charted in ugly and spectacular ways by James Bond himself. The world which had set up the books and the films, a world based on order, deference, nostalgia and hierarchy, had to retool feverishly in the face of uncontrollable spasms of democratic waywardness. We turn our eyes away from the humiliations of Connery's notionally Japanese fishing clothing in You Only Live Twice because of the far greater humiliation of his 'Japanese' special toupee and plucked eyebrows. By the time of On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1969 the audience's face is being stuffed into some unredeemable clothing disasters — Bond's white dress shirt decorated in freakish curls and flounces, an offensive kilt, a weird plaid jacket. And from then on it is all unstoppable — a short pink tie in Diamonds Are Forever, a safari suit in Live and Let Die — but by now we are plunging into the world of Roger Moore's dress sense, which may or may not be reflecting wider societal changes, but is in every important way a personal disaster."
—Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey Into the Disturbing World of James Bond

11.15.07

Mencius v. Economics. (Mises excepted; and Bryan Caplan may also be getting a bum rap.)

11.14.07

The girlfriend says: "I want every object on this guy's site." She'll get nothing and like it.

11.13.07

How humor dates, by a guy who ought to know. (However, the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera is still pretty funny.)

Make your razor blades last.

An obsessive's photo tour of New York City.

11.12.07

How to win at Monopoly.

What the bond market thinks will happen in Iraq.

Everything is like software: many things are not like hardware.

A genetic puzzle.

11.11.07

Roger Kimball, who, unlike Conrad Roth, does not know what "jejune" means, shovels dirt on Norman Mailer's grave. (Conrad himself adds a few spadefuls.)

What does one call, in these medium-independent days, a collection of multiple songs by a single performer? I vote for "album"; others differ.

An honest article about race and IQ in The New York Times not written by Nicholas Wade.

11.10.07

German language and German thought. With a rarely-seen correct use of "jejune" in the comments.

Is Greg Mankiw the devil incarnate? Ask Greg Mankiw.

Everything you probably didn't want to know about whether we live in a simulation.

The New Segregation in pop music, with useful dissents in the comments.

11.9.07

Therapy works, for reasons that will provide cold comfort to therapists.

11.8.07

Visuwords. (Via MR.)

Christianity - God = Dawkins. (Part 7, yes seven, of seven.)

There are hardware problems, and there are software problems, and then there are A.C. Douglas's problems.

11.6.07

Everything you wanted to know about James Watson, arguably the world's most distinguished living biologist, publicly pilloried for saying something not only true but obvious. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

11.5.07

Auto-Pollack.

11.4.07

"A colleague once defined an academic discipline as a group of scholars who had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions."
—Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization

Critics and novelists choose (except for Edmund White, who does not understand the question) five books that all reviewers should know. The five best that appear: Mimesis by Erich Auerbach, Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson, Romantic Image by Frank Kermode, and Parodies, edited by Dwight Macdonald. The five best that do not: Forms of Discovery by (Arthur) Yvor Winters (hey you knew that), English Poetry: An Introduction by F.W. Bateson, The Mirror and the Lamp by M.H. Abrams, Men Without Art by (Percy) Wyndham Lewis, and Practical Criticism by I.A. Richards. The panel stands convicted of bias against authors who go by initials and middle names.

11.3.07

Smoking is glamorous. Smoking is cool. God I miss smoking. (Via Armavirumque.)

10.29.07

Any chump can write a comic book featuring Raskolnikov as Batman. But to write the lady pawnbroker as the Joker, and Inspector Porfiry as Commissioner Gordon — that takes genius.

10.27.07

Of "whomever." (Via Language Hat.)

10.25.07

Pythagoras refuted; or at least called into question. (Via Cosh.)

10.15.07

It is pleasant to read someone expressing, only slightly more articulately than yourself, what you have already thought of, or nearly thought of but not quite found the words for, or would have thought of except for all the other important affairs that occupy your time. To read what would have never crossed your mind is a much less happy experience.

10.13.07

According to this, I use more of the right than left side of my brain. Are they quite sure they haven't got it reversed? (Via MR.)

10.9.07

The stupidest remarks all begin with the same three words: "My philosophy is..."

10.8.07

Take an insanely trivial activity. Let T represent its index of triviality, growing as the activity becomes more trivial. Now take someone who is insanely skilled at it. Let S represent this skill. As T and S increase, how quickly does the probability that this person is male approach 1?

A Niels Bohr story that I hope is not apocryphal. (Via Heaven Tree.)

10.6.07

Powers of Ten, Flash edition.

The importance, for a journalist, of being an asshole. By a guy who ought to know.

10.3.07

Yes, Edmund Wilson really was that tiresome.

"The Golden Age of Cable News lasted from Anita Hill to the OJ Simpson trial in 1995, after which people started to realize that they were wasting their time."
—Steve Sailer

A quite technical but nonetheless readable discussion of heritability and malleability in IQ. Contains several cautions for people who like to talk about "the" heritability of intelligence.

10.2.07

The top 50 dystopian movies. The commenters complain that Idiocracy, at #45, pollutes the list. On the contrary, it is far too low. Most dystopias, from We and Brave New World on down, work far too well, albeit to nefarious purposes. Mike Judge has seen the future, and it is broken.

10.1.07

"Quand je suis le plus faible, je vous demande la liberté parce que tel est votre principe; mais quand je suis le plus fort, je vous l'ôte, parce que tel est le mien." —Louis Veuillot

(Approximately: When I am weaker, I ask you for liberty, because that is your principle; but when I am stronger, I take it away, because that is my principle.)

Come to think of it, Joe Pesci does look a little like Ernie.

9.28.07

A map of the econblogs, by Felix Salmon. (Via Megan McArdle, despite being excluded.)

9.26.07

A rather Pynchonian review of Against the Day. It is odd that someone so deeply interested in things and so utterly uninterested in people should choose to be a novelist.

9.25.07

But Robin Hanson isn't bitter, oh no.

"What's fascinating about Chomsky is that, in a way, he is an infallible guide to reality. You just have to reverse him precisely. In Chomsky's mind, Poland is always invading Germany."
—Mencius Moldbug

9.23.07

Adventures in pop neuroscience: Crockusology, and Shatner's Bassoon.

9.22.07

Reviewing the medicine on House. (Via Cosh.)

PC: it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. (Via Moldbug.)

9.15.07

In an upset, something on The Valve worth reading: Joseph Kugelmass on self-creation from Dale Carnegie through The Rules and The Game.

Elephants on acid, two-headed dogs, and other bizarre experiments. (Via MR.)

9.14.07

A hitherto unknown price/punt relationship.

A Hayekian defense of earmarks. Note: not authorized by Hayek.

"You're having dark thoughts and want to kill yourself? Could you hold just a moment, please?"

9.12.07

"If he thought the original was like that, why did he bother to translate it in the first place?"
—Professor J.J. Sylvester, on a bad translation of Horace.

9.10.07

This guy needs to watch Scenes from a Marriage.

Less medicine, please.

9.9.07

"A few Republican panaceas, myself and people like myself..." Reagan speaks for himself.

9.8.07

Sha'ria linguistics.

9.7.07

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting it to produce different results, then everyone who uses a computer is insane.

Flynn on the Flynn Effect.

You load sixteen tons of data, and what do you get?

9.5.07

The trouble with the gold standard.

How much cash should you keep in your wallet?

9.3.07

Even as you sleep, your cat may be preparing to overrun Austria.

9.2.07

The Pinch-hitter Principle; or, why janitors aren't expert at cleaning toilets.

9.1.07

Spandrels: an annotated list.

No one wants to play Sega with Harrison Ford.

8.31.07

Tyler Cowen deems Will Wilkinson's "It is a thrilling, if repulsive, dream" his sentence of the day. It isn't even the best sentence Wilkinson wrote this week. That would be: "The phrase 'easy to imagine' has all the virtues of theft over honest toil."

Some serious trompe l'oeil.

And they're off! Or are they? (Via Megan McArdle.)

It becomes clear that neither David Brooks nor Drew Westen is funny.

The Lorax: environmentalist fable or tragedy of the commons?

Why airports sell what they sell. Plus the first recursive link I've ever seen. I must not be paying attention.

8.30.07

The worst cars of all time. (Via The Blowhards.)

GRE scores by field of study, with philosophy turning in a surprising performance. Clip 'n' save.

The diminishing set of games that humans can still win. The species will soon be reduced to bridge and go.

8.29.07

"Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy."
—Karl Kraus

Genetic reversals and evolutionary distance. (Via 3QD.)

Who pontificates about animal rights should not pull wings off flies. (If you must, like this.)

8.28.07

What should you read next?

8.27.07

Apparently there were quite a few homicides in the Old West. Who knew?

Overcoming Bias: Who Cares? Another GMU Economics Department smackdown! Cowen v. Hanson v. Caplan v. Kling.

8.26.07

Oh by the way, which one's pink?

I am now slightly less embarrassed about having this song on my iPod.

8.25.07

Carrie Frye catches us up on her social schedule: "I've been working like a fiend all week in anticipation of a trip to Martha's Vineyard this weekend with my friends Hortense and Boozy (who live in New York)." Hortense lives in New York? Boozy too? You don't say.

Cross-ideological dating? Up to a point, Lord Copper.

Language Hat boldly parses what no man has parsed before.

8.24.07

On not going to the Robert Fripp show:

What for? To see what skinny tie Fripp was going to wear that night? Or maybe to hover around the scene in the bloodthirsty spirit of an autoracing fan, hoping for some kind of catastrophe with the Frippertronics?

Maybe that’s the secret — they were hoping a chip in the delay pedal would short out and Fripp would be forced to announce an impromptu live performance of the complete Lark’s Tongues in Aspic with audience members as his sidemen. “You play percussion? Marvelous. Here are your chains, and I’ll need you to change into this loincloth.”

—Colby Cosh

More Cosh: A heraldry puzzle.

Conrad Roth delves into the world of lunatic advertising, the sort that makes Dr. Bronner's soap bottle and Dutch Schultz's last words look like models of lucidity.

8.22.07

I don't watch game shows, and I don't watch the presidential candidates, but I would definitely watch the presidential candidates on a game show.

8.21.07

Megan McArdle left The Economist for a gig at The Atlantic. Good for her. As for the rest of you sods, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?

8.17.07

Words fail me. (Via Cosh.)

8.16.07

You've observed the phenomenon, now learn the word.

Google: An Introduction. (Via 3QD.)

I've done this. Have you?

8.15.07

A bit, from Budd Boetticher's Comanche Station, which Terry Teachout alleges to be "masterly in its economy":

Claude Akins It wouldn't surprise me if somebody didn't try to take that woman away from you.
Randolph Scott Like you, for instance?
Akins Like me, in particular.

I am not employed in writing economical dialogue. However, this passage, brief as it is, contains one unintentional double negative and at least seven extra words. Maybe people really talk this way — although I doubt it — but then we ought to be praising "realism," or something else. Economy would be:

Akins Somebody might try to take that woman away from you.
Scott You, for instance?
Akins Me, in particular.

I prefer the original; but economy has nothing to do with it.

8.14.07

The blog of unnecessary quotation marks. It is to "laugh." (Via Volokh.)

Norman Mailer attributes his failure to win the Nobel Prize to his bad character. Doubtless. But just in case the Stockholm committee simply lost his address, he can be reached at Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer Inc., One Norman Mailer Drive, Norman-on-Hudson, NY.

8.13.07

"I propose a moratorium on the use of this word, 'silly', to describe intellectual efforts of past ages. It betokens a mind closed to the difficulties of history—closed to those aspects of the past that are genuinely strange to us."
—Conrad Roth

Finally, the definitive story behind Colby Cosh's name. If you can't trust his mother, who can you trust?

"Second-best" economics comes out second best.

As has been noted here before, biography is pornography.

8.11.07

Steroids? Nah. Body armor? Could be.

Is global warming a question of land management? (Via 3QD.)

8.9.07

Appliances, for him and her.

What to name your blog. 2 Blowhards: OK. Shakespeare's Sister: noooo. God of the Machine: undiscussed, but probably not recommended. Also undiscussed: taking a perfectly reasonable blog name, pretending it's a pseudonym, and using it to refer to your family members and your pets. (I say it because I love you.)

Age v. achievement.

Bulletin from the Institute of Tautological Studies: the best predictor of a movie's popularity turns out be its popularity.

8.7.07

Invest successfully, or believe you're investing successfully. Choose one.

What exactly do poor people's utility curves look like?

8.4.07

Department of Anonymous Remarks I Wish I'd Made: "Edith Wharton wrote the sort of novels Henry James would have written if he had been a man."

The United Countries of Baseball.

Everything you always wanted to know about slippery slopes but never thought to ask.

8.3.07

Comp Sci Friday: Mencius on the trouble with CS research, at his customary enormous length (get that man an editor!); and a far briefer computer language timeline.

8.2.07

The Sowood hedge fund blowup letter, annotated.

8.1.07

The sports news could be worse.

If committees are bad, how can brainstorming be good?

It's beginning to look like nobody will win the Netflix Prize.

7.31.07

Oddly, women never tell me "That was beautiful" when I pull a stunt like this at a dinner party.

7.30.07

Though I discounted perhaps twenty per cent of the atrocity details as wartime exaggeration, that was not, of course, sufficient. Recently I saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings put in chronological sequence:—

When the fall of Antwerp became known, the church bells were rung [i.e., at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany]. Kölnische Zeitung.

According to the Kölnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken. Le Matin.

According to what The Times has heard from Cologne, via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken, have been sentenced to hard labor. Corriere della Sera.

According to information which has reached the Corriere della Sera from Cologne, via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down. Le Matin.

—Robert Graves, Good-Bye To All That.

The war was the First World War, but plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Except now the atrocity stories no longer require a game of journalistic telephone, and at least one side generates its own. That's how I'm betting anyway.

Science journalism redux.

You are aware, I trust, that Sir Ian McKellen isn't really a wizard. (Via 2 Blowhards.)

7.29.07

Only a slight exaggeration.

7.28.07

Tyler Cowen recommends practicing gratitude. Just don't practice it with Tyler Cowen.

Worst album covers.

Overcoming "bias."

7.27.07

Unfortunately the questions for the Democratic candidates' debate were supplied by YouTube viewers instead of Radley Balko.

7.26.07

Patrick Kurp discovers the greatest of all poetry anthologies, my sole bedside book for most of my twenties, Quest for Reality, by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields. Eventually he may discover that his hero John Williams' anthology, English Renaissance Poetry, plagiarizes, almost entirely, Winters' choices from the period.

Of the making of lists there is no end: the Top Seven Exciting Moments in Science, along with some reasonable emendations. (Via 3QD.)

7.25.07

Of the many reasons to read Gene Expression, none is more important than their countdown to Jacques Barzun's 100th birthday, now 127 days away.

Queen guitarist completes Ph.D. in astrophysics. Honest. Astrophysics, Freddie Mercury...there's an excellent joke in there somewhere that just isn't coming to mind. (Via Unqualified Offerings.)

A simple cure for science journalism.

7.24.07

A bit of catching up to do, so let's get to it, boppers.

Clive James's Cultural Amnesia is the best bathroom book since The Book of Lists, from which my late brother obtained the bulk of his education. One hundred mostly brief essays on major and minor, mostly 20th century, cultural figures, most brief. A handy guide to who flirted with which tyrant. A distillation of a lifetime of reading in more languages than I have even considered learning. Here are five good bits from a book that consists almost entirely of good bits:

"Any sufficiently clever remark floats upward until it attaches itself to someone sufficiently famous." James instances "When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver" — universally attributed to Hermann Göring but belonging to Hanns Johst, an obscure Nazi litterateur.

Peter Altenberg's reply to a girlfriend who complained that he was interested in her only for sex: "Was ist so ohne?"

"Edward Gibbon wrote a book that inadvertently raises the question of whether English prose style can be, or even should be, an end in itself." The analysis that follows is lousy, but the question is excellent.

Arthur Schnitzler: "There are all kinds of flights from responsibility. There is a flight into death, a flight into sickness, and finally a flight into stupidity. The last is the least dangerous and most comfortable, since even for clever people the journey is not so long as they might fondly imagine."

Erik Satie: "Ravel refuses the Legion d'Honneur but all his music accepts it."

Slagging classic records. Trout Mask Replica did, in fact, suck.

Hipsterism, the view from Romania.

A guide to personal productivity from someone who is actually personally productive.

Philosophy of surveillance in 24 and The Wire.

Eugene Volokh sucks down smoke from Morse v. Frederick and holds it in.

Choking, at tennis, by gender.

Cesar Millan acquitted of animal cruelty.

Philosophers condensed.

Mission Improbable: A student finds a use for Toni Morrison.

Bounded radicalism.

Caddyshack: "How do you compare yourself to the other golfers in the club?" "By height."

The Economist: "How do you compare yourself to other paintings in the gallery?" "By area."

I have often argued that life is like high school, but Bryan Caplan goes me one better: Human history, apparently, is like high school.

Set points in everything.

Overrated novels. Catch-22? Sure. Catcher in the Rye? Certainly. Gravity's Rainbow? All right!

New Yorkers feel approximately about Bloomberg as Russians do about Putin.

Online avatars on the left, reality on the right. What possessed these people to consent to this?

Neither sonnet is very good, though the first one is unaccountably famous. Also Laura does not know what a caesura is. That aside, the analysis is excellent.

Steve Sailer almost persuades me to read Robert Heinlein. If I hadn't already essayed Stranger in a Strange Land, I might have been convinced.

So you want to eat at Alain Ducasse...

Banned books. Far from complete, but instructive.

Martin Weber, the original posterizer.

Finally, the way to organize my library.

Beyond anamorphism.

Mid-century European history is a trap. Half of the punditariat needs to forget the lessons of Munich; the other half needs to forget the lessons of the Marshall Plan.

How to park in New York.

Yiddish? Colin Powell speaks Yiddish?

"It's remarkable how clear explanations can become when an expert's trying to persuade you of something, instead of just explaining it."

—Eliezer Yudkowsky

A word frequency chart for bloggers, by gender. Which sex uses "pink" more often? How about "Linux"?

Cosh discusses one of the hoariest of legal hypotheticals. As for Justice Holmes's reputation, would it were so.

An elegy for tobacco. God I miss cigarettes.

A duty to retreat?

Mugabe Optimality.

There is the Texas way of dealing with armed robbers, and then there is the Washington hostess way.

A persuasive piece of future history.

Compatibilism 101.

Two pretty good translations of a Russian poet I have never heard of, Dmitri Prigov. By "pretty good" I mean "pretty good in English"; I don't know Russian. (This is, in fact, what everyone should mean, whether he knows the original language or not.) And two more, even better ones.

I would not have thought it possible for Regents exams to be any easier than they were thirty years ago. I would be wrong.

New York, underground.

If we must have agricultural subsidies, at least pay them to dead people.

5.31.07

Via everyone, suicide notes.

5.28.07

Calling all smartmouth pantywaists: Help Colby "My blogging software is Notepad" Cosh redesign — if one can speak of the current site as "designed" — his site in Movable Type. The prize is his "reluctant gratitude," and who could pass that up?

5.22.07

Conrad Roth on a super-sub-grammarian.

5.16.07

Salvador Dali on What's My Line? I was favorably impressed by the panel, the introduction, the host, and Dali, in that order. (Via Asymmetrical Information.)

5.14.07

IDEs make you stupid.

A post you can't refuse: law and economics in The Godfather. Note to Ilya Somin: the reason people forget that Don Corleone said that "a lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns" is that it wasn't in the movie.

5.7.07

Wasn't Tom Ewell's job in The Seven-Year Itch doing something like this? (Via Cosh.)

Understanding France; or, why the French economy will go to hell in a handbasket before the French do anything about it.

5.5.07

A sample of Satan's Book Club. (Via Steve Sailer.)

4.27.07

How long can he keep this up? Why, indefinitely.

Is your prose male or female? A couple of my random passages came up male; a couple from Megan McArdle came up female. I'm convinced!

4.26.07

Please read this blog carefully before investing. (Via Catallarchy.)

Contronyms. Regular commenter Bill Kaplan suggests "cleave" and "sanction." (Via MR.)

4.21.07

The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. Random House. 366 pp. $26.95.

Everyone in the world, except Taleb and a few friends of his, is a chucklehead. Taleb is a chucklehead too, but knows it, and is thus a genius. Sort of like Notes from the Underground, but with diagrams. Also, no one ever came up with a good idea while wearing a tie, or a bad one while sitting in a café. (His view on sitting in a café while wearing a tie is unclear.)

Recommended.

4.19.07

Sometimes only the academic style will do:

Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities. Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.

—Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzerl, The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution

For the cover, if for nothing else.

4.18.07

By their prose shall ye know them: Conrad Roth dissects a classmate, who grew up, if that is the phrase, to be everything he was supposed to be but thankfully is not.

Andy Warhol's relationship to global warming? Oh yes.

Only one man can plausibly argue, in a single (admittedly enormous) article, that Jackie Robinson was underrated and that Adolf Hitler really integrated major league baseball. That man is Colby Cosh.

4.17.07

Roombotics.

What Leonard said about what Radley said.

4.12.07

Abolish high school. (Via Econlog.)

Who feeds the China scholars? (Via MR.)

4.11.07

The best comment on Joshua Bell in the Metro. The runner-up.

You can't beat the curve.

4.9.07

Argument is like software. (Everything is like software.)

4.7.07

Steve Sailer on Endowment Boy. Haven't we seen this guy someplace before?

4.5.07

Tyler Cowen's readers choose the best books under 100 pages. Worthy non-obvious nominees: The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov (146 pages in my edition, but small pages and lots of leading), Miss Lonelyhearts (OK, pretty obvious, but mentioned only once), and The Death of Ivan Illyich (don't read it if you're feeling under the weather). Best books not nominated: The Kreutzer Sonata (more Tolstoy, this time at his most cynical), Gödel's Proof by Nagel and Newman (an amazingly lucid explanation of an exceptionally difficult concept), and The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Mises for the masses).

4.1.07

For April Fool's, a fool gets his. (Via Cosh, no fool.)

3.29.07

The permanent work of "ending poverty." (Via Deogolwulf.)

Meet John Doe. Repugnant, isn't he?

3.28.07

Jim Henley takes a brief respite from detailing the horrors of George Bush to muse on the coming horrors of Hillary Clinton.

3.27.07

Finally, a government subsidy I can get behind: sky-diving for the elderly.

The Lives of Others is every bit as good as Julian Sanchez says it is.

Stefan Beck chooses fiction's top five gruesome repasts. Among the missing: my supreme gross-out, Trebius's banquet from Juvenal's Fifth Satire.

3.26.07

Future Ethics: Hal Finney throws down the gauntlet, and Ilya Somin picks it up.

I should have seen this coming — almost did.

3.25.07

The funniest NFL public service ad since Ronnie Lott telling kids to stay in school. (Via Jim Henley.)

You're a brain, in a vat, at the wheel of a runaway trolley...

3.24.07

If you could talk to Archimedes on the chronophone, what would you say?

3.23.07

That is sooo Economics — or is it Physics? — 101.

Michael Blowhard goes Rashomon on 300.

Accidental comic book humor.

3.22.07

"All mortals turn into the things they are pretending to be."

—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

3.19.07

Best sentence I read today: "If it were just you that the Brits annoyed, I wouldn't really care." A.A. Gill, in Vanity Fair, on his fellow British expats in Manhattan.

I hugely enjoyed Fooled by Randomness, but Mahalanobis has a point.

Goodbye to the desert of the real: I guess Jean Baudrillard really did die, since I noticed.

3.15.07

I won this league six years running, before retiring. I thought you needed to know that.

An excellent appreciation of Ikiru from Jon Hastings. Rashomon is a bit stuffy, as he says. On the other hand, I tried to watch Hollywood Knights on his recommendation, so he owes me one.

Are you de man? No, Sasha Volokh is de man.

3.14.07

Terence Tao, Fields Medal winner, age eight.

More important(ly).

3.13.07

When you can't trust a historical database of analysts' recommendations and earnings estimates that is sold to institutional brokers and investors who employ those same analysts, well, what can you trust? (Via Instapundit.)

The whole economic/social liberty thing? Meet the new dichotomy.

3.12.07

A not-nice story for a not-nice age.

3.11.07

Tenure, what is it good for? Mankiw v. Levitt v. Caplan v. Cowen.

3.10.07

Jim Henley on the coming propaganda war over the court ruling overturning the DC gun ban, with a title that I cannot improve upon.

How not to dispose of diethyl ether.

3.6.07

This beggars comment.

The limits of portraiture. Illustrated. Did Marilyn Monroe really look that much like Carol Channing?

3.5.07

So you wanna write a textbook...

More Mankiw: Ten Principles of Economics, translated.

3.3.07

Anthony Bourdain steps to the Food Network. Not that he's wrong, but I remind him that his short-lived Food Network show also sucked — but in a unique, cutting-edge way! (Via 3QD.)

Dylan Hears a Who. (Via Ghost in the Machine. No relation.)

This be, if not the, at least a, verse.

The network is omniscient.

3.2.07

The top 1%? Or the top 1% of the bottom 1%?

Not quite absolutely, positively overnight. Still, can you think of another business that stakes its reputation on 100% reliability and delivers more than 99.9% of the time?