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Manny Farber on Sunset Boulevard
Recently I bought a copy of Farber on Film, and I’ve been flipping through it, sporadically reading here and there; last week I happened across his famous piece on Sunset Boulevard (1950). These lines and observations are fairly well-known, but…
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Books, Guns, and Brains
Over at Mind Hacks they’ve got a post running called “A brain signature for literacy.” It’s covering a neuroscience study done that shows “how the structure of the brain changes as illiterate adults learn to read and write.” What’s fascinating…
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #6
PORCUPINES ★★★★★ (3 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing porcupines.
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Not-So-Ancient History
A first novel set in modern Zimbabwe begins: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.”
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Still Bored to Death?
Jonathan Ames has a great blog about his HBO TV series Bored to Death. In this post he talks about the irony of engaging in an S&M session with his former student and then the very next evening being part…
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Notable San Francisco, This Week 10/19-10/25
This week in San Francisco, geek gods at Cafe Du Nord, Michael Bartalo talks recyclable art, Ghostface Killah hangs out on Haight street, and more: Monday 10/19: Get your nerd on at Cafe Du Nord’s W00tstock where geek gods Adam…
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Achebe Fights Darkness
Over at NPR is an interview with Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart. In the article, which is accompanied by an audio interview with Achebe, he talks about his relationship with Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. According…
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The Death of the Music Industry Foretold With Shapes
And other (the truth about Twitter) elegant (venn diagram of drugs) infographics (a time-line of media scare stories). Because information must be free — and beautiful.
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Notable New York, This Week 10/19-10/25
This week, Chinua Achebe speaks, n+1 in conversation with Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, Jonathan Lethem reads, composer/drummer Bobby Previte with Psychedelic Furs’ Knox Chandler, photographer Jeff Wall presents more urban decay, “junkyard bohos” Huggabroomstik play, CMJ Music Marathon begins…
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A Clean, Well Lighted Place for Thoughtful Essays
Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a thoughtful, historical essay several thousand words long on the Huffington Post. The piece is a concise history of terrorism, or rather, of the modern chapter of terrorism, beginning in the nineteenth…
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Whatever Entrepreneurs Can Dream Up…
…con-men have thought of first. Wandering through Old Bailey records, I found an 1889 investor scam worthy of a dot-com: