Remarks
Classical prose
is -- Clive James, praising Mark Twain's "homespun demotic" style
Remarks
Remarks
Time and change
"The only reliable lesson the past teaches us is how locked we are in the present. People ask, Where are the great Hollywood movies, the great pop songs, the great television newsmen, the great Democratic presidents, the great public intellectuals, the Great Books?, as though these were all eternally
Intellect
Fooled by randomness
In his recent book, Fooled by Randomness, hedge-fund operator Nassim Taleb twists a familiar saying to provide an analogy for people (such as, say, some mutual fund investors) who make investments based solely on past performance: IliadOdyssey Iliad
Remarks
A Freudian slip?
The headline from an article about the Notre Dame football team in the Washington Post edition for November 23, 1963 (note that date): Irish Shooting for Atonement (I wonder if someone got fired over that...)
History
Chirac's foreign policy
At first glance, it is puzzling that Jacques Chirac, the major French conservative of our time, led the effort (and went to such an extreme) to oppose the American government's decision to occupy Iraq. But as the founder of the Rassemblement Pour la République, Chirac is, above all,