Hand it to the rich — no, wait, they already took it. Anyway, they get the job done. From my latest Read 2 roundup, a connection of pieces on wealth paints a dismal picture. (Unless you’re one of those 80). First, from Michael M. Phillips at The Wall Street Journal: In 2010, it would have taken […]
Continue reading →One of the underrated pleasures of the internet is all the old stuff we can now read — goodies that 20 years ago you could read only by going to a major library and hunting. A few weeks back, someone or something pointed me to a sort of English major’s dream hiding within The New York Times of […]
Continue reading →For reasons that will become apparent in 2015, I was digging around this morning about Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, and I ran into this luscious paragraph, which opens William Gass’s review of the novel in the New York Times, January 04, 1987. THERE have been thousands of different drawings of the world, many maps made of reality. […]
Continue reading →Earlier, in the wicious pride of my youth, I sometimes threw myself into postures, imitating writers I admired and producing a certain amount of Proust and water (the recipe for the Avignon lark pâté comes to mind: one lark, one horse) to Joyce and very small beer; but none of this survived the war, […]
Continue reading →John Hawks, the funny, fearless, adventurous anthropologist who writes one of the richest blogs in all academia, recently read an editorial at Current Biology that, “wishy-washing its way through a non-opinion about the value of blogging in science,” worries that blogging opens the door to “criticism [that] can be harmful.” Better, the editorial writer suggested, to […]
Continue reading →Note: This review first appeared in Nature, 2 May 2012. My thanks to Nature for the commission and fine editorial support. When it is published later this month, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-5, will mark well over a century of formal guides to psychiatric diagnosis. The first two psychiatric […]
Continue reading →Temple Grandin has a new book out, and over at the Times, I’ve a review of it — rather mixed, I’m afraid: For a quarter century, Dr. Grandin — the brainy, straight-speaking, cowboy-shirt-wearing animal scientist and slaughterhouse designer who at 62 is perhaps the world’s most famous autistic person — has been helping people break […]
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