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Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

I don’t like to slag off (semi-)liberal writers, but what, exactly, keeps Timothy Noah employed? He’s a typical mainstream journalist lifer, rotating between right-wing news outlets (US News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal) and center-left magazine-style venues (TNR, Slate). He managed to change sides on the Iraq war not once but twice, and [...]

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I picked up Penn Jillette’s new book God, No!, yesterday, and am already most of the way through it. It’s pitched as an atheist’s version of the “Ten Commandments”. (This apparently was prompted by an exchange Penn had with Glenn Beck that resulted in Penn dashing off his own version of the Ten Commandments and [...]

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Startlingly clear-headed, absolutely right-on interview at Salon with Ira Isaacs, the defendant in a long-running censorship trial, about the absurdity of the obscenity doctrine and the stupidity of the government’s prosecution. Trigger Warning: censorship

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OK, so here’s as good a place as any to weigh in with my take on the Huckleberry Finn business. UPDATE: At commenter Dan M’s suggestion, I have put in a jump cut here, for reasons of length and to facilitate a “trigger warning”. TRIGGER WARNING: Contains literary criticism. Also, text involving racial slurs.

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This is hilarious. Some guy in London is going around affixing “journalism warning labels” on copies of local papers. He includes a template so you can print your own.

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And it apparently doesn’t involve paper: E-books are becoming more popular by the minute thanks to devices like the Kindle, Nook, and iPad, but major dead tree publishers have been hesitant to go all in—until now. Dorchester Publishing, which describes itself as the “oldest independent mass market publisher in America,” has decided to ditch its [...]

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I write likeDavid Foster Wallace I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing! The internet tells me this is true and the internet is never wrong.

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In an interesting post about a new book on modern capitalism, there is this example of why command economies fail: My late colleague Evsey Domar, who was, among other things, a student of the Soviet economy, told us how the planning bureau began by setting production quotas for paper factories in tons per year. The [...]

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How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel is probably the book that I have enjoyed the most in the last year. It helps that I have a deep interest in physics and the history of physics (Uncertainty was another recent read at the top of my year’s best), but the book is [...]

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Holy crap is this guy off his rocker: The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin [...]

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