I haven’t done a jello post in a long, long time. To rectify that shameful failing, I bring you this [hat tip Ed Driscoll via Instapundit]: Jell-O might be the glistening dish of picnics and potlucks, but for Allie Rowbottom—a … Continue reading →
And I mean big, big trouble. No Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded this year as a result. Pity (that’s sarcasm, in case it’s not clear). That first link I gave is to a very long story about the … Continue reading →
It’s extremely popular, but not for the reasons you might imagine: The popularity has little to do with interest in Judaism, let alone with the Holocaust. It is Anne’s personal story that draws most readers in, particularly young female readers. … Continue reading →
There have been two suicides of prominent celebrities in the news in the past few days: Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. I’ll talk about them a bit later in this post, but I want to start with something more general—this … Continue reading →
Author Philip Roth died last Tuesday. You can read hundreds of tributes to him and many criticisms of him, and I don’t have too much to add to that except to say that I liked his early works (including two … Continue reading →
Writer Tom Wolfe has died at 88. Reading a lot of commentary around the web, I notice that Wolfe was a deeply meaningful writer to a great many people, some of whom say he changed their lives. I have to … Continue reading →
This article about how head injuries sometimes (although very very rarely) lead to savant powers made me think (once again) of the Jorge Luis Borges story “Funes, the Memorious.” Fortunately, the work appears in its entirety online, so if you … Continue reading →
Frost again: The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But … Continue reading →
This doesn’t sound like a good idea to me: …[A] new artificial intelligence research project coming out of Japan…can analyze a person’s brain scans and provide a written description of what they have been looking at. To generate its captions, … Continue reading →
I find that lately I’ve been pulling back ever-so-slightly from day-to-day politics. It’s not that I’m not writing about that sort of thing; I definitely still am. I just find that, for the most part, the stories du jour are … Continue reading →
—John Updike: we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. Delmore Schwartz was a mid-20th-century poet with a tragic life but a wonderful gift. In fact, Saul Bellow wrote the novel Humboldt’s … Continue reading →
Yesterday and today, on the comments thread to this post I put up last night, there was a great deal of discussion about the reactions of the security guard at Parkland who failed to engage the shooter or even enter … Continue reading →