For anyone, like me, endlessly and no doubt stupidly fascinated by how writers go about their work, check out this wonderful article in The Wall Street Journal. My favourites? John Wray took a laptop onto New York subways, sometime for six hours a day. Nicholson Baker writes ‘in a dreamlike state’ from 4 AM to [...]
I’m fascinated by how best (a loaded word, does it mean most efficient or most rewarding or something else?) to live in a world heading increasingly digital. So a chance encounter with this self-published book, Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload by Mark Hurst, sends it straight onto my list.
Tim at The Clash Blog informs us that London Calling by The Clash will form a UK stamp. Have the anti-establishment rebels been stamped out at last? (Yes, it’s a lame joke but does anyone else yearn to keep artists out of the commercial arena?)
I normally don’t bother with the slanging matches between faith and atheism. Very few of them add much. But I am most interested (and, frankly, troubled) by the sly way Christians encroach upon science classrooms. So I did take the trouble to watch (thanks to a post on The Reason Project) an online excerpt of [...]
I’m away, busy reading but unable to easily blog. Normal service will resume at the end of this week.
Split across the August 3 and August 10 & 17 issues of the New Yorker, Ian Frazier (apparently a ‘social satirist,’ a novelist and essayist both, with some ten books published) writes of his car trip across Siberia. ‘Travels in Siberia’ was, of course, of great interest to me, since I’ve been across that great [...]
Atheists always have to ask the question: what will you do to honour your belief in no religious belief? Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum fan the flames a bit in a recent LA Times article anticipating Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, due out in about a month. Their article [...]
Winter bird life is frustrating. Yesterday I walked along the snaky Yarra River at Warrandyte, sometimes high above, sometimes close down and low. I caught two commonplace birds square in my binoculars, which for me is a grand triumph: a plump crimson rosella and a sulfur-crested cockatoo that flew away, showing its wonderful white chest [...]
The Harvard Medical School (specifically George Church as founder) has had going for some time a project that hit a chord with me. In essence, under the Personal Genome Project, you volunteer to have your entire genome mapped. The catch is that it becomes public property. At the extremes, one can view this two ways: [...]
A great new blog opened up some three weeks ago. The Clash Blog is a wonderful celebration/exploration of everthing to do with that seminal band. I’ve added it to the Signposts on the right. For example, when I was in New York last, in 2007, did I go to the East Village to check out [...]