The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers In sleepy Fenland St Paul, the death of a villager is marked by nine rings of the great bell, Tailor Paul, in the tower of the church. The visiting sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, finds himself challenged by a mystery involving jewel theft and murder that centres on the [...]
Archive for June, 2010
Ten of the best bells in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged March 6 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Not having a blog
Posted in Living on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
I should have one, of course. I mean, shouldn’t I? I’ve been urged to get one. A confused middle-aged literatus like me, trying to keep himself afloat while the old industry paradigms, the old machineries of reputation and reward, shiver into fragments around him? I need a blog. A place to consolidate my brand. A [...]
Uncommon Knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged June 20 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
It’s true, your boss is a psychopath Watching the news some days, you’d think a lot of companies were run by psychopaths. And, according to a recent study, some might well be. One of the authors of the study was hired by companies to evaluate managers — mostly middle-aged, college-educated, white males — for a [...]
The best vacation ever
Posted in Living on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
How should you spend your time off? Believe it or not, science has some answers. Monday summer officially begins, and freed from the hunker-inducing cold, New Englanders’ imaginations have already turned to vacation: to idle afternoons and road trips, to the beach and the Berkshires. School is out, and the warm weekends stretch before us, [...]
A Workout for Your Bloodstream
Posted in Living on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
What does exercise do to your body? It may seem as if science, medicine and common sense answered that question long ago. But in fact, the precise mechanisms by which exercise alters your body — at a deep, molecular level — remain poorly understood. A number of analyses of the effect that exercise has on [...]
Lady Power
Posted in Living on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
If you want to get a bead on the state of feminism these days, look no further than the ubiquitous pop star Lady Gaga. Last summer, after identifying herself as a representative for “sexual, strong women who speak their mind,” the 23-year-old Gaga seemed to embrace the old canard that a feminist is by definition [...]
Dad on Money: ‘Do as I Say…’
Posted in Living on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Over the span of a lifetime, we learn more about saving and investing from personal experience than from any expert. In my case, the most formative experiences have been the lessons learned by watching my parents with their money, especially later in their lives. My parents are the first to admit that when it comes [...]
What I Learned in Pappy’s Study
Posted in Living on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
My father challenged me to find an answer to the most serious question: How to live a life worth leading? I can still see him now, balding and bearded, seated behind his massive wooden desk, his powerful shoulders bent over a book, left hand pulling a pencil across the page. I enter Pappy’s study and [...]
Sitting With Marina
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Performance art, as currently practiced, emerged as an avant garde movement in the 1960s and ’70s, and some of its features made it difficult to visualize how it might make the transition from galleries and public spaces to the more institutional environment of the museum. For one thing, the medium of the artist is his [...]
The Very Angry Tea Party
Posted in Other on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its [...]
A Snakebit President
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Americans want leaders on whom the sun shines. The president is starting to look snakebit. He’s starting to look unlucky, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t Mr. Carter’s fault that the American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, but he handled it badly, and suffered. He defied the rule of the King in “Pippin,” the Broadway [...]
On Art, Action and Meaning
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
In a comment on Arthur C. Danto’s post, “Sitting With Marina,” a reader, TM Shier, wrote: “This article is a disappointment. It is descriptive, not explanatory. It answers none of the really interesting questions raised.” Those questions, as posed by the reader, and Mr. Danto’s answers, are below: Q. Is performance art really art at [...]
Five Best Books on Inventions
Posted in Physical sciences on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Eureka! William Rosen hails these books about inventions 1. Longitude By Dava Sobel Walker, 1995 The story of the first marine chronometer, invented by the self-taught British clockmaker John Harrison, had a remarkable number of dramatic elements. Thanks to the Longitude Act of 1714, the protagonist’s goal—a £20,000 prize for a method of determining longitude [...]
The Openness Elixir
Posted in Living on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
In the marketplace of ideas, progress depends on freedom—and the expectation of error The word “slick” did not come to mind as Tony Hayward, the embattled chief executive of BP, foundered in a sea of congressional questioning this week. Never in the face of righteous political indignation did expertise look so unconvincing and so unworthy [...]
Frederick Douglass’s Eloquent Autobiography
Posted in Literature on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The orator’s 1845 ‘Narrative’ was his claim to the rights conferred on a human being—to be his own master Frederick Douglass was proficient in two genres that may not appear to go together: the oration and the autobiography. Of the latter, he wrote not merely one, but three: “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, [...]
Daddy Was Only a Donor
Posted in Living on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
A new study paints a troubling portrait of children conceived by single mothers who chose insemination. In “The Switch,” coming later this summer, Jennifer Aniston plays an attractive 40-year-old professional who has given up on finding Mr. Right for marriage and decides instead to move straight on to motherhood with a donor father. The movie [...]
The President’s Animosities
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Since when was the American idea us versus them? The oil company formerly known as British Petroleum is starting to look kind of beaten up. So it goes when a business finds itself tossed into the ring with the current president of the United States. “We will make BP pay,” Mr. Obama said Tuesday night. [...]
The Bad News About ObamaCare Keeps Piling Up
Posted in Editorials and opinion on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
It’s now obvious that many millions will lose the coverage they have. In his brilliant exposition of why sweeping policy changes often have unintended consequences, the late sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote that leaders get things wrong when their “paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes the consideration of further or other consequences” of [...]
Should This Be the Last Generation?
Posted in Other on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents? For most people contemplating reproduction, those are [...]
Obama and the vision thing
Posted in Editorials and opinion on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of [...]
Of Storytellers and Statesmen
Posted in History on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
A 17th-century Flemish depiction of the Trojan Horse tale from “The Aeneid.” Cicero wrote that to be ignorant of what happened before your own birth is to remain always a child. Much later, Henry Ford disagreed. He famously dismissed history as “bunk,” believing that each new generation would make its own history, by its own [...]
‘Last Generation?’: A Response
Posted in Other on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The role of philosophers — and I take it, of The Stone — is to stimulate people to think about questions that they might not think about otherwise. That so many people were roused to comment on my piece, “Should This Be the Last Generation?” — despite comments being closed at one point — suggests [...]
Implacability
Posted in On Language, tagged June 20 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
In my recent column on cool, I wrote, “From Old English to the ages of Chaucer and Shakespeare all the way to the present, cool has been able to mean ‘dispassionate, calm, self-composed.’ Some of our latter-day cool expressions — ‘stay cool,’ ‘play it cool,’ ‘cool as a cucumber,’ ‘cool customer’ — play off this [...]
Monster of rock
Posted in The Word, tagged June 20 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Megalithic’ and the power of metaphor If global warming brings sea levels dangerously high, could “a megalithic building project” help Boston ward off the threat? A couple of weeks ago, Ideas writer Drake Bennett described such a proposal for a barrier in Boston Harbor, one that would use “massive sea gates that could swing shut [...]
For the birds
Posted in Health on June 17, 2010 | Comments Off
What regulates the lengths of human fingers? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours FROM financial traders’ propensity to make risky decisions to badly behaved schoolboys’ claims to be suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, testosterone makes a perfect scapegoat. In both of these cases, and others, many researchers reckon that the underlying [...]
The bright side of wrong
Posted in Living on June 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Our tendency to err is also what makes us smart. Here’s what we’d gain from embracing it There are certain things in life that pretty much everyone can be counted on to despise. Bedbugs, say. Back pain. The RMV. Then there’s an experience we find so embarrassing, agonizing, and infuriating that it puts all of [...]
Iterate
Posted in On Language, tagged June 6 2010 on June 17, 2010 | Comments Off
If you use Facebook much, you know the drill. You log on for your social-networking fix, and the site looks different from how you remembered it, either subtly or radically so. An endless stream of design changes can leave users feeling unsettled — or even irate, as has been the case with the latest uproar [...]
Geo whiz
Posted in The Word, tagged June 13 2010 on June 17, 2010 | Comments Off
How a prefix went from grounded to virtual MAYBE “SUDDENLY hot prefix” isn’t a phrase you utter in everyday conversation, but if you’ve noticed the rise of geo- lately, you might be tempted. Geo- used to be reserved for a set of fairly staid words: geography, geology, geometry. If you wanted to get fancy, you [...]
Five Best Books on American Moguls
Posted in Economy and business on June 17, 2010 | Comments Off
T.J. Stiles says these mogul biographies offer rich rewards 1. Andrew Carnegie By Joseph Frazier Wall Oxford, 1970 In the past few decades we have seen a sweeping reassessment of the so-called robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The trend began in 1970 with Joseph Frazier Wall’s “Andrew Carnegie”—a groundbreaking work that [...]
The Long Flight From Tyranny
Posted in Other on June 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Firsthand accounts of Burma’s refugees, living difficult half-lives on a dangerous borderland Reading about modern Burma can be an ordeal—like a journey into the abyss. The situation in this godforsaken country is so dire—and the result of such dunderheaded thuggery—that you wonder why you do it to yourself. On the upside, at least you’re not [...]
