In 1876, the courts of Dayton, Ohio, ordered the execution of a 19-year-old who had murdered an admired citizen. Things went well enough, for such an affair, until the rope broke. The poor young criminal had fallen on his back, apparently unconscious, with the broken rope around his neck, and the black cap vailing his…
There’s been a fair flap lately about John Horgan’s argument that optogenetics and its potential have been overhyped by both scientists and some journalists (including myself, I think, from my inclusion in one paragraph listing “glowing coverage”). I like it that Horgan is pushing back a bit, because I think the field stands in danger of…
It is surprising that it was not until 2006 that the first epidemiological study comparing England and the United States found a social health gradient in both. What was unanticipated was that America as a whole was sicker than England (10). Even those at the top of the U.S. social ladder, despite their access to…
I’ve a feature on “The Social Life of Genes” coming out in Pacific Standard next week Tuesday 3 Sept, which I discussed yesterday on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show. Here, while that feature is in queue, is a look at one aspect of genetics the feature addresses: The need to understand the importance of gene expression, not…
Today I was on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show talking about “The Social Life of Genes,” a feature I wrote that will appear appeared in Pacific Standard’s Sept/Oct issue. Day by day, week by week, your genes are in a conversation with your social world. Your neighbors, your friends, your family: They don’t just get under your…
This Anthony Lane homage to Elmore Leonard is not only the best thing I’ve read on Leonard. It’s the best new thing I’ve read in weeks. Every sentence rings. Here’s a prime bit: One problem was that a single page of him made other writers, especially the loftier and more lauded variety, seem about as…
A glorious find for any Virginia Woolf fan. For a Virginia Woolf fan writing a book about a scientifico-botanical metaphor about the nature of sensitivity and flexibility, it is a treasure. This is from Forster’s slim 1942 volume, Virginia Woolf, taken from lectures he gave in Cambridge and London in the year after her suicide. There…
I’m having a rich time bouncing about Virginia Woolf: A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909, edited by Mitchell Leaska. This one-volume collection, published in 1990, covers the journals and diaries Woolf kept between the ages of 15 and 27. They fill a blank space left by the better-known and endlessly fascinating five-volume The Diary of Virginia…
What a loss. What spirit and humor and ear and humanity and comedy and, at times, excruciating tension. That scene toward the end of Killshot where the gun is on the table and the two bad guys are talking and laughing and she starts to think Maybe I can just grab it and shoot ‘em. And it was always scarier because if you’d read a couple Leonard books you knew he was willing to kill off a good guy (or gal) right when you least expected; never saw it coming.
Good Lord. This will take some time to getting used to.
The Times does a nice job here.
Mr. Leonard’s narrative voice was crisp, clean and direct. He had no time to waste on adverbs, adjectives or tricky verb forms, and he had no patience for moody interior monologues or lyrical descriptive passages. His dialogue, too, was succinct, as in this passage from “Riding the Rap”:
“ ‘She isn’t home,’ Raylan said.
“Bobby nodded toward the red Toyota in the drive.
“ ‘Her car’s there.’
“ ‘She still isn’t home,’ Raylan said.
“ ‘Maybe she’s asleep or she’s taking a shower.”
“ ‘When I say she isn’t home,’ Raylan said, ‘it means she isn’t home.’ ”
It takes only three words — “Look at me” — for Chili Palmer, the Miami loan shark in “Get Shorty,” to strike terror into the hearts of the deadbeat clients he hounds for late payments. “You never tell the guy what could happen to him,” Chili explains. “Let him use his imagination, he’ll think of something worse.”
via Elmore Leonard, Who Refined the Crime Thriller, Dies at 87 – NYTimes.com.
Clip at the top from Out of Sight. Ima have to go on a Leonard jag now. Could get me through the winter.
Behold the fruits of having a flying-obsessed 11-year-old who watches too many flight videos. This should really be at BoingBoing, but I found it first.* (I want a remake with Miles & Xeni.)
I love the deadpan expressions on the humans. Dog too, for that matter. Give it credit for just trying to deal.
*Maybe. I didn’t check; they may already have it.