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Why Must an Author Twit? 26 Aug 2013 | 09:00 pm
I’m reading with the greatest pleasure Zoo Time, the latest novel by Howard Jacobson. The narrator is an author called Guy Ableman, and one of its subjects is the parlous state of publishing today. I...
The OED Redefines “Information” Yet Again 25 Jun 2013 | 08:29 pm
The entry for information in the Oxford English Dictionary always makes good reading. It’s substantial: close to 10,000 words long. I see it has changed again. The last time I looked, the Number One ...
Wikipedia’s Women Problem 30 Apr 2013 | 02:48 am
There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the c...
Total Noise Gets Louder 21 Apr 2013 | 01:23 am
Kids used to ask each other: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Now there’s a microphone in every tree and a loudspeaker on every branch, not to mention the video … Co...
Taking Daylight Saving Time to Extremes 8 Mar 2013 | 11:53 pm
This is the weekend when the clocks do something—spring forward, it must be—and from now on Daylight Saving Time will always remind me of Marcel Aymé, born 111 years ago this month, a writer of “fanta...
P.S. re preserving our species memory 19 Jan 2013 | 09:23 pm
Having jotted the below item on Twitter and the Library of Congress, I belatedly rediscovered the following. Too easy to forget these things. From the wise and foresighted Steve Martin, 2008:
The Twitterverse Goes to the Library 17 Jan 2013 | 12:28 am
[also at the NYR Blog] “What food for speculation each person affords, as he writes his hurried epistle, dictated either by fear, or greed, or more powerful love!” —Andrew Wynter (1854) For a brie...
Ada’s Birthday 10 Dec 2012 | 09:10 pm
Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, was born 197 years ago, 10 December 1815, so it’s safe to say that many bicentennial preparations are already getting under way. What an unusual sort of celebrit...
Autocorrect, Unexpurgated 5 Aug 2012 | 10:56 pm
For those who cannot live without @scarthomas, the full version of my Autocorrect piece is here.
Harald Bluetooth? Really? 3 Jun 2012 | 11:31 pm
I wrote this—Inescapably Connected—eleven years ago. There was no such thing as “iPhone.” Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were barely coming into view. The “Network” was rising all around. We sipped information t...
