Michael Bérubé posts about Yeats, mentioning in passing that he’s the greatest English-language poet of the 20th C. I replied there that I prefer Stevens, Eliot, and possibly also Auden; but “prefer” is not quite the same thing as “consider the greatest.” Outside of some appreciative pockets, this kind of question is something I haven’t [...]
Is the next big thing in today’s tour of the news. I’m immediately curious about how often this has been used in horror stories, and I’m ashamed, given how much time I spent reading them in adolescence, that no examples come readily to mind. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine by Catherine [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
This, at least, is amusing: In the middle of it all are longtime residents such as Brzezinski, who at 78 remains active at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the District. He bought his five-acre estate, with its relatively modest, older house, nearly 30 years ago. He doesn’t much care for the mansions [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
I think foreign policy should definitely be taken out of men’s hands. Men should continue making machines, but women ought to decide which machines are being made. Women have far better sense. They would have never introduced the infernal internal combustion engine or any other of the evil machines. Most kitchen machines, for example, are [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
Polymath Cosma Shalizi has an entertaining review of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. I have a paper in various stages of revision on the rhetoric of Wolfram’s book, and Shalizi’s discussion of Wolfram and the taxonomy of crankishness is very apt there. In fact, I invoked his guano comparison in the version I [...]
Comments Off :: Read on
I doubt very seriously that many habitual Slashdot readers will be interested in the film adaptation of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, directed by the Wachowski brothers and starring Natalie Portman.
This Guardian article points out some unpopularities, but there’s no mention of the fact that there’s still no Olaf Stapledon entry. It’s still on my Amazon wish list, linked over to the right there, and please feel free to start gifting anytime now, please.
:: Read on
As we may observe with children and soldiers, common activity is not excluded even in the excretory functions. The one great exception is provided by the sexual act, in which a third person is at best superfluous and in the extreme case is condemned to a state of painful expectancy. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and [...]
:: Read on
No. This is the best book cover of all time. Via Bookslut.
