I really have very little to say about the phenomenon known as lonelygirl15, except to point you to a few good articles, and this excellent video. I’m not sure how much sense the video will make if you haven’t been following along, but I think reading one article and watching one or two videos is [...]
A year and a half ago I wrote about being weirded out by the name of a dish at a restaurant in an upscale neighborhood in Ahmedabad. I later learned that less than a year before that the government of Gujarat had produced a textbook which had chapters titled “‘Hitler, the Supremo‘ and ‘Internal Achievements [...]
While I earlier made fun of the The Five Friendlies, the official mascots of the Beijing Olympics, I really like the pictograms they have chosen to represent each of the sports. Found via the increasingly prolific Pinyin News (this summer has been chock full of great posts), here are the pictograms, along with the ancient [...]
There has been an interesting debate on the web about whether or not short-term swings in US electoral politics make much of a difference to long-term economic trends affecting inequality. It started with an op-ed by Paul Krugman which sparked a wildfire of commentary, outlined here and here. In a followup e-mail to DeLong, Krugman [...]
Existential Exodus is a book by a family friend. I haven’t gotten my copy yet, so I’ll just quote this Amazon Review by “Motorcycle Boy”: Although one might get the impression from Surfergirl’s synopsis that Existential Exodus falls in the genre of “addiction fiction”, this is not the case. Henry defeats his drug addiction soon [...]
One thing I’ve learned about the British: they love to tell you alternative routes. If you ask how to get from point A to point B, don’t expect to just be told the shortest, quickest, route as a New Yorker might tell you. No, the British will tell you a half a dozen possibilities. My [...]