No real answer is provided in this Vanity Fair article, although the title [“Why Writers Lie (and Plagiarize and Fabricate and Stretch the Truth and…”)] would have you believe it will offer one. This is the closest it comes, and … Continue reading →
[NOTE: The following is a re-edited and updated version of a post that has appeared previously on this blog.] Unbelievable that it’s been eight years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically. As time passes, the number of readers here … Continue reading →
[Hat tip: Fuzzy Slippers at Legal Insurrection.] The NAS (National Association of Scholars) reports on the slant of the books on the typical college reading list given to incoming freshmen to prepare them for the rigors of college study: Hundreds … Continue reading →
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.] I write some poetry from time to time, And gravitate to forms, I must confess. I crave some meter and a bit of rhyme. Free verse can be illusory progress. The … Continue reading →
Remember the Miller Analogies Test? It was one of those “this is to this, as this is to which of these?” tests that supposedly tapped into a person’s logical reasoning ability as well as the person’s knowledge base. Analogies can’t … Continue reading →
I try to follow the general outlines of the current theories of theoretical physics, but it goes without saying that I don’t understand the math, and that I miss a lot of the details. So although I’d never even heard … Continue reading →
As far as I’m concerned, the 1948 David Lean black-and-white version of “Oliver Twist” is the masterpiece of the many movie versions of the story. I first saw the film as a child and it scared me horribly at times, … Continue reading →
Decades ago, the book review section of the NY Times used to be one of my favorite portions of the paper to read of a Sunday, back when I read it in the paper version. Implicit in my mind—without my … Continue reading →
Famous author Joyce Carol Oates is known for the number and length of her fiction output. But she’s also a Twitter-user, and yesterday she retweeted this pithy thought: “I could shoot 24 million people on Fifth Avenue & I would’t … Continue reading →
The other day I was reminded by commenter “AesopFan” of this article from last spring: “[Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Ben] Rhodes, 38, said in the article that it was easy to shape a favorable impression of the proposed (Iran) … Continue reading →
Wordsworth wrote: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…” Now researchers indicate that sleep itself is a forgetting: In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during … Continue reading →
It seems that Monica Crowley may have plagiarized a substantial portion—amounting to “thousands of words”—of her doctoral dissertation. According to Politico: An examination of the dissertation and the sources it cites identified more than a dozen sections of text that … Continue reading →