Monthly Archives: October 2007

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

31 October 2007

[Cover]

Recommended.

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Wisdom of the Crowd

31 October 2007

In “The Cranks Who Swear by Citronella Oil” at the Observer, Nick Cohen uses the instructive example of homeopathy to expose the dangerous climate of anti-elitism (read: celebration of ignorance and stupidity) that stifles modern intellectuals.

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Monsters

30 October 2007

From the 2007 New Yorker Festival comes a conversation (on video) between Martin Amis and Ian Buruma on writing about monstrous figures.

Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged , ,

In the Rough, For a Buck

29 October 2007

At the New York Times, Charles McGrath looks into the trend of publishing unedited material.

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Real Life

28 October 2007

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

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A Curious Measure

27 October 2007

Steven Johnson examines Amazon’s text statistics.

. . .the two stats that I found totally fascinating were “Average Words Per Sentence” and “% Complex Words,” the latter defined as words with three or more syllables–words like “ameliorate”, “protoplasm” or “motherf***er.”

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An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

26 October 2007

[Cover]

Recommended with reservations.

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Proud Atheists

25 October 2007

Salon is running an interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein that fairly crackles with tonic intellectual rigor.

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