Awesomely, one of the New Yorker weblogs published a post musing on another very new-to-me reason for reading, not reading, and/or finishing a book during the same week as the HRSFANS-discuss book recommendation thread I wrote about in July. (By the way, I have started—barely—to collate the recommendations list on the wiki. Please help! “‘Paperbacks-for-the-road’
The other month, a to-be-commended HRSFalum asked through HRSFANS-discuss for good books to bring on a long vacation, imposing only constraints that they be in-print (reasonably available) mass-market PBs. As one might expect, this generated an excellent recommendations list (which someone really ought to collate for the HRSFANS wiki—shoot, I volunteered again, didn’t I?), if
Returning to a "slow-burning" personal-intellectual project I first mentioned here in October, I consider the questions raised in my mind by a friend who does not read non-fiction (except for academic work). My case study is Henry VIII of England the break from his first marriage.
Earlier this fall I encountered an pair of goddesses to enthrall me, part of a larger pantheon on display in a coffee shop. More recently I found contact information for the artist, Jonah Kamphorst, and asked for their stories; he has been kind enough to send some preliminary pointers prepared for an earlier show. I
Probably dozens of you noticed Charles Murray‘s recent Washington Post essay days before I did. I came across it yesterday, looking over my husband’s shoulder as he chuckled at one of the (no doubt legion) bemused/snarky response weblog posts, one that block-quotes the several paragraphs listing examples of cultural touchstones that “members of the New
Last weekend a long-standing friend and I re-wove a fascinating set of threads from a once shimmering and strong connection that had been somewhat out of repair. Also that weekend, over brunch, she told my husband and me that she cannot enjoy art from creators she knows to be jerks. I got a bit wistful
The world of Algebraic Geometry (to which I have personal but absolutely no professional ties) is kind of tempest-tossed at the moment. I wouldn’t be suprised but what a number of you would enjoy thinking about and commenting on what’s going on. In brief, lay terms, as I have heard it, there was this brilliant
Casting my memory back lo these many years (those of you who know my actual age may snicker) I think I can trace my own fascination with alternate history to an epigraph for a chapter in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, The Fountains of Paradise. Almost all the Alternative History computer simulations suggested that the
Speaking of Faith is pretty darn awesome as radio programs go. The tag line is “… conversation about religion, meaning, ethics and ideas …” (formerly “… conversation about belief, meaning, ethics and ideas …”, which in my mind scans better). These topics do produce fantastic conversations, and I’ve encountered quite a few of them just by
So I’ve got this friend who, with a few compatriots, is in the beginning throes of a new weblog. And while the writers may be a bit alarmed if we actually turn our attention to them (those of you at Harvard in April 2001 may remember a certain Matt W. response to “neo-fascist refutations of
