Friday, February 27, 2009
Paul Graham, in this essay, really puts his finger on something I’ve thought for years but never formulated so well or so precisely: More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that [...]
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
I am toying with the idea of not using the computer on weekends. This would be very good and very bad. Good because I feel like I’m always in front of one, and my internal life is almost constrained to the virtual. Once I woke up in a darkened crawl space and forgot where I [...]
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
You don’t have to give a shit about the process of writing to appreciate the truth in this conversational excerpt between Jonathan Letham and Paul Auster: PA: I’ve found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience—both physical and mental—and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself [...]
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Times magazine has a _fantastic_ article on basketball statistics, using Shane Battier as a case study. I enjoyed this article so much that I would make love to it if I had it in hardcopy, nevermind the messiness and social awkwardness that would result. The piece discusses intelligently a topic that is almost never [...]
Sunday, February 15, 2009
You know I’m a sucker for the end of civilization stuff. This article, which compares the presently-collapsing United States with the collapsed USSR was a thoughtful read, and probably a good antidote to the polyannas popping up and saying that, no, really, everything is actually fine and will be fine forever, who are themselves a [...]
Friday, February 13, 2009
The Sports Guy has his annual NBA Trade Value column up, finally. It is my favorite Sports Guy column every year. In it, he ranks the top players in the NBA according to these rules: 1. Salaries matter. Over this season and the next two, would you rather pay David West $27 million or Amare Stoudemire [...]
Thursday, February 12, 2009
I used to eat like one of those starving Somalian kids would eat if he found himself, suddenly, transported to our Land of Plenty, and I mean that literally: first the stuffing your face with food, then the violent illness afterwards when your system can’t cope with it. This was the era of donut eating [...]
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Watching MSNBC this morning, I stumbled across a good debate on the TARP money, and the banks that got some of it and the banks that went under and the CEOs answering questions before Congress this morning. On one side was the guy who says the banks should be able to give bonuses because they [...]
Pal, gracious host, and “Youngest Broadway Propmaster in NYC” Scott selects books for me. Possibly because he thinks I might enjoy them. Possibly to improve my execrable sense of culture and taste. The latter two causes are likely lost, but the books _have_ been enjoyable, both for pure reading pleasure and as sources for the [...]