This first ran March 9, 2011. I haven’t changed my mind. Crows take care of each other, talk constantly, have their enemies lists, are smart, are wicked, and remind me a lot of the rest of us.“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a […]
Ann
So, LWON is eclipsing, on into next week. And if the internet is to be believed, half the country will be pulled north and the other half south and they’ll converge in the middle, on the path of totality. It’s charming, how a population that normally lives at arm’s length from earthly reality — milk […]
Ann: Please meet Adam Rogers. He wrote a story about DARPA looking for solutions to the credibility problems of social science, only what I’m calling “solutions to credibility problems,” he called bullshit detection. First, social science’s credibility problems. Here’s the way I said it in 2015: Start with any question involving human behavior or motivation and […]
This ran not that long ago, August 23, 2016. But I feel it should be run again because it has an important update. Recently, Helen and I made mint lemonade again, this time with Jenny. As the post suggests, we blended-and-spigoted at the same time, and instead of demarara sugar, we used white. The pond scum […]
I’d been reading a book by Colm Tóibín called House of Names. The house is the House of Atreus; Tóibín explained through a character why he substituted “names,” but I didn’t understand it. He took the story pretty faithfully from the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes about one or all members of the family. […]
My friend and colleague, Sharon Weinberger, has a new book out called The Imagineers of War. It’s a history of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Agency, an agency with which she has had, as a journalist, a long and storied history. One of DARPA’s proposals was for a wearable jet pack. Just let that sink […]
I have a mild case of fatal familial obsessive-compulsive disorder. (At least, if that were real I’d have it.) Today’s obsession is the Fall Line. It’s the line that runs through the big east coast cities — New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Richmond, all the way down to Columbia SC and […]
I had dinner the other night with, among others, a graphic designer. He said he liked looking at contemporary photographs but to be honest, he didn’t know why he liked looking at them. He knew they were better than snapshots, he said, but he didn’t know why they were. I’m certainly the last person to […]