I have a bit of a backlog here, but really what’s so important about being timely with these things? Who cares if many of these came out in the end of August…it’s been a busy semester. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!<\/p>\n
Slate: This browser shortcut is like ctrl-z for the entire internet<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n An interesting article<\/a> on Pynchon. Good quotes:<\/p>\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s my sense,\u201d [a librarian talking to one of Pynchon’s old navy shipmates] mused, \u201cthat when you\u2019d stop in Barcelona and the sailors would go to bars and whorehouses, he\u2019d go to see a death cast of Chopin\u2019s hands.\u201d<\/p>\n Pynchon later wrote that his time abroad during the Suez crisis turned him \u201cfrom a Romantic into kind of a classicist,\u201d which he defined as a writer who thought \u201cother people were more interesting than I was and therefore better to write about.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article<\/a> with letters from Paul Samuelson to his nephew Larry Summers. (Trick of the Day: For paywalled WSJ articles, all you have to do is search for the article on google [it might only work for google news] and click on the link that way and you can circumvent the paywall.)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Andrew Sullivan on how blogging makes your writing better<\/a>. There are drawbacks in terms of time, the way blogging makes one feel obligated to stay up-to-the-minute rather than taking a more contemplative approach. But much of is it true—certainly about Morozov. Maybe I’ll even stop using footnotes… A good point, too, for writing education. In another incarnation of my writing course<\/a>, I might look into this. (Let me warn, though, that there’s a huge danger of the fetishization of “new media” in writing pedagogy. Also, I think it’s important to respect students’ wishes for privacy–and even to offer an in loco parentis<\/em> protection of students’ future wish that they had been more discreet when they were younger. Maybe as an 18-year-old I might not have minded having to blog my opinions, but as a 28-year-old, I’m really glad that such things aren’t online.)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n This looks like a cool course<\/a>. It’s a shame that math really is too disparate for such a thing to work. For one, papers take much longer to read. But the big thing is that I really can’t understand an advanced paper in a different subfield.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Gay Talese on George Plimpton and the Paris Review<\/em> crowd searching for Hemingway<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n I am a SymSys pseudo-alum; Mike Krieger—worth circa $100m now—and I were the first two members of the class of 2008 to declare Symbolic Systems, and I worked as an RA in the Symbolic Systems theme house as a junior, but I ended up switching to math and never bothered to take an introductory cognitive science course requirement, so I didn’t even graduate with a minor in SymSys. Still, the influence of symsys on my freshman seminar<\/a> on math, linguistics, and writing, and on much of my thinking, is profound. ↩<\/a>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a bit of a backlog here, but really what’s so important about being timely with these things? Who cares if many of these came out in the end of August…it’s been a busy semester. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Pavlov Poke for Facebook. Slate: This browser shortcut is like ctrl-z for the entire internet An … <\/p>\n
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