A post-WTC time capsule.
A post-WTC time capsule.
I just wanted to add the above comment to Bob’s notes on language. Spoken (and, to some extent, handwritten) language can be much more expressive than the typed version. I’m not just talking about slang or words such as baaaaad; I’m also talking about pauses that give logical structure to a sentence. For example, sentences [...]
From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t [...]
When linking to my review of Duncan Watts’s book in a recent post, I came across some fun bits that I’d like to share (for those of you who didn’t just click through and read the whole thing): On business books: I’m not so interested in the business angle but I suppose that’s how you [...]
In our recent discussion of plagiarism and fake quotes, a commenter points to two recent posts by Mark Liberman (here and here) where Liberman links to about a zillion cases of journalists publishing quotes that were never said. He goes into some detail about two journalists from the New Yorker: Jared Diamond, who created quotes [...]
Jay Livingston critiques the recent pronouncements of sociologist and cigarette shill Peter Berger, who recently has moved into cultural criticism of New York’s mayor for living with “a woman to whom he is not married” (this is apparently a European sort of thing, I guess they don’t have unmarried partners in the parts of the [...]
Robin Hanson writes that he does’t use slang: I [Hanson] am not into slang. I want to talk to the widest possible audience, and to focus on timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics. I can see why people want to signal loyalty to their groups, especially in the military, but [...]
I liked it; the reviews were well-deserved. It indeed is a cross between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. What struck me most, though, was the contrast with Indecision, the novel by Harbach’s associate, Benjamin Kunkel. As I noted a few years ago, Indecision was notable in that [...]
I sent the following email to Thomas Basbøll: I read this: http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/p/writing-coach.html and was reminded of this: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/10/could-i-use-a-statistics-coach/ He replied: Which reminds me of this http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2011/10/teacher-or-coach.html We seem to be approaching some sort of Platonic ideal in which we can conduct an entire conversation from links to our previous writings. Just like that joke about [...]
This (from an article by Alec Wilkinson) is amazing: Did Louis Armstrong and his wife really have this conversation? This is just too much!
