Skip to main content

February 19, 2018

From The TLS (Steven Pinker on “What is your favourite book published in the past twelve months?”):
Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s The Internationalists. The authors take up a question close to my heart – why has interstate war declined precipitously since 1945 – and, perhaps not surprisingly for a pair of legal scholars, suggest that it is because war is literally illegal. Through most of history, this was not true – might made right, war was the continuation of policy by other means, and to the victor went the spoils. They date the change to – don’t laugh – the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war in 1928. Though it was not respected right away (to put it mildly), the pact was the basis for the UN’s similar prohibition in 1945, which had more teeth. This is a big-think book; like The Clash of Civilizations and The End of History, The Internationalists tries to make sense of the world of today in the context of centuries of history. And Hathaway and Shapiro tell their story with literary flair.

From The TLS (Steven Pinker on “Do you have any writing tics?”):
During the years in which I plan a book I am a packrat, amassing quotations, cartoons, cultural allusions, datasets and hundreds of articles and books. Once I begin to write I become a monomaniac, working day and night to complete a first draft, followed by cycles of revisions – ideally, six drafts before it goes to my copy-editor.

From The Guardian (Joyce Carol Oates on “The book that changed my life”):
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass certainly had a profound effect on both my life and my writing.

From The Guardian (Joyce Carol Oates on “The book that had the greatest influence on my writing”):
Possibly the stories of Franz Kafka. Or Dubliners. Or Wuthering Heights. Or ...

From The Guardian (Joyce Carol Oates on “The book I’d most like to be remembered for”):
Like most writers I would be grateful to be remembered for something … It would certainly depend upon individual readers. My 2000 novel Blonde, perhaps. It was the novel that caused me the greatest heartache and left me most exhausted. But failing that, perhaps my memoir The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 24, 2018

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...
Post a Comment
Read more

January 30

From  University of Virginia Working Paper : This paper studies how collecting offender DNA profiles affects offenders’ later recidivism and likelihood of getting caught by exploiting a large expansion of Denmark’s DNA database. We find that DNA profiling increases detection probability and reduces recidivism within the following year by as much as 43%. We estimate the elasticity of criminal behavior with respect to the probability of detection to be -1.7, implying that a 1% higher detection probability reduces crime by almost 2%. We also find that DNA profiling changes non-criminal behavior: profiled offenders are more likely to engage in a stable relationship, and live with their children. From Iris Murdoch : Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. From  Iris Murdoch : I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time. From  Iris Murdoch : Of course reading and thinking are impor...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 26, 2018

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...
Post a Comment
Read more