There’s a good article in the NYT that shows how efficient the privatization of health care services in prisons has been.

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“One Highlander on the beaches of Dunkirk was overheard telling a comrade: ‘If the English surrender too, it’s going to be a long war’” (318 qtd in. “Hitler’s England: What if Germany Had Invaded Britain in May 1940?” by Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson. In Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Ed. Niall Ferguson. New York: [...]

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I’ve been looking through the Ayn Rand Institute’s archives, but I can’t seem to find the rejoinder I thought they published to that Temple of the Dog song? Anyone have any leads?

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“All the work Pinochet did is intact,” said Christian Labbe, a former army colonel and one of Pinochet’s closest advisers. “Nobody is fighting to change the free market that we built, not even the Socialists. We need to give credit to the person who made all of this.” From the Post. I watched CSPAN either [...]

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I am unsure what to think of this.

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Did Rob Reiner, in his 1971-1978 period, ever research a monograph on Cabeza de Vaca’s account of the 1527 Narvaez expedition?

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Investigators determined that the man and Tran on Saturday night had argued over a pending breakup. The relationship had lasted a little more than a year but the man no longer wanted to be involved with the woman, police said. At some point, the pair decided to have sexual relations and the man agreed to [...]

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I read A Man in Full in about thirty minutes, it felt like, after arriving in Atlanta; and I foolishly thought beforehand that Wolfe would be over the phrenosomatical obsession with muscles and personality I remembered being irritated by when I read Bonfire. From the reviews I’ve read of Charlotte Simmons, it’s only gotten worse. [...]

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Did you know that the town of Bingham, NM had a “no-UN” ordinance? And that the mayor’s a poet?

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“And then it was blockquote-city.” “[. . .]” “I put ’69′ at the end of all the bogus citations.” “[. . .]” “It’s a piece. Piece of. Piece of.” “[. . .]” “Good times.” “[. . .]” Do I even need to mention that one was wearing a powder-blue Izod sweater over an upturned white [...]

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What would you guess the odds of the Cleveland Public Library being one of six libraries listed in Worldcat as owning López’s Libro de la invención y arte del juego del axedrez to be?

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Seeing “howard + hart + CIA” searches showing up in your logs from Raytheon.

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Is there any doubt that the best moment of Skidelsky’s Politicians and the Slump is the caption to the photograph of Baldwin looking particularly sententious between pp. 82-83 that reads “Mr. Baldwin has invented the formidable argument that you must not do anything because it will mean that you will not be able to do [...]

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I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. Blogs have been making google nearly useless for a long, long time. My quotation of an AP story was the number one hit for “Carisa Ashe” for at least a day, for example. That’s not what you want out of life. And this will also help [...]

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(I first my apologize to my classes yesterday for two things: first, I was not serious about your last papers having to be written in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön. Second, “catoptromancy” was the word I was looking for.) Chapter 20 of Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer is entitled “Father Inire’s Mirrors.” The protagonist [...]

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A short review of Richard Parker’s biography of Galbraith contains the following: If that interpretation construes the facts in a light favorable to Galbraith, Parker is consistently so inclined. Yes, he concedes, many economists consider Galbraith not really one of their own in a discipline that extolls mathematical models and aspires to the scientific rigor [...]

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I try to keep this here blog free of “driving cornflakes to work this morning,” but I heard this monstrosity—this crime against humanity—in the gym today (and why can’t the Tech gym play the campus radio station or, better yet, the Georgia State campus radio station?); and it won’t go away.

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