A blog about ideas, literature, math, economics, language, law, technology, society, etc.
Two summers ago, I sat in on a wonderful introductory poetry course taught by John Whittier-Ferguson. Among the poems we read was Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet Astrophil and Stella 63 (“O Grammar rules…”). In this sonnet sequence,1 Astrophil is less than successfully wooing Stella. By this 63rd sonnet he resorts to linguistic trickery: You have …
Continue reading “A Sonnet for Morgenbesser: Dear Astrophil, Love Stella”
UCLA English professor Robert Watson writes a very interesting article about the economics of higher education: Bottom Line Shows Humanities Really Do Make Money I have a good deal to say about the misleading arguments often made about the cost of higher education. Perhaps at some point I’ll take the time to say that here. …
This week’s New York Times magazine features an article by Adam Davison about economists Larry Summers and Glenn Hubbard. Forgive me for being superficial and ignoring the weighty macroeconomic topics discussed in the article; instead I’m going to offer three thoughts about the basketball tie-in. On Scrawny Moderately Athletic Kids The article begins with Larry …
Continue reading “Larry Summers and Glenn Hubbard Shooting Hoops”
If you haven’t read Eric Naiman’s fascinating article about the hoax of Dostoevsky meeting Dickens yet, you should. (It’s a long but fun read; give yourself time to enjoy it.) A great New Yorker article on NASA’s Curiosity rover to Mars, by Burkhard Bilger. A few questions: (1) There’s a high failure rate in these …
It’s been a busy few weeks with research and the end of the semester. I promise I’ll get to writing substantive posts very soon. In the interim, I’d like to express my incredulity at John McPhee’s ignorance of the “irregular restrictive which” until it was pointed out to him by New Yorker editor William Shawn: Mr. …
Continue reading “John McPhee and the Irregular Restrictive Which”
Many things in life are decided by groups of people making judgments together—in courts, committees, board rooms, legislatures, etc. Collective decision-making has much to recommend it: groups of people can pool their wisdom, no one person can rule by fiat, organizations can benefit from the cohesion of people working together, etc. And, of course, there …
Continue reading “The Irrationality of Committees and Courts: A Voting Paradox”
Some more links. Why do companies buy out startups just to get their employees, rather than just offering them higher salaries, which seems like it would be cheaper? An interesting article in the NYT gives some answers to this puzzle about so-called acqui-hiring in Silicon Valley.1 See also the longer law article by the original …
I wrote in my introductory post that I am ambivalent about much of contemporary fiction. Well, it’s wonderful to come across as singular a counterexample as Mohsin Hamid’s beautiful novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This is the sort of work that reminds you why you read; I heartily recommend it to all. (A word of advice: …
Continue reading “Allusion and Undertones in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”
I imagine in the blog that I will be sharing various links to articles, etc., that I find interesting. Perhaps lightly annotated. Rather than overburden your RSS feed or whatnot with too many individual entries (cough, cough Andrew Sullivan, who I would subscribe to if there would be some way to do so without it …
The eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s Herzog spends his days writing letters. Moses Herzog1 is writing to “everyone under the sun…to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.”2 Later, he pauses during one his letters: He …