In his book, Daily Rituals, Mason Currey dug into Hemmingway’s 1958 Paris Review interview: When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and [...]
History
Is Dante still relevant in our new world? As if to prove this point, the most recent season of Mad Men kicked off with John Ciardi’s 1954 translation of Inferno: Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. Last month poet [...]
We’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals. Since the mid-sixties, the amount of time spent preparing meals has fallen by half. While the global trend is the same, Americans lead the way. They spend less time cooking than any other country. One thing we do more of, however, is talk about cooking. Celebrity chefs [...]
From Steven Pinker’s edge.org article The False Allure of Group Selection. Pinker argues that the more carefully you think about group selection, the less sense it makes, and the more poorly it fits the facts of human psychology and history. Human Psychology and Bees? So for the time being we can ask, is human psychology [...]
If you missed out on attending the famous TED conference this year — you’re not alone. But now you can queue up some of the books that were available at the TED Bookstore for your spring reading pile. The bookstore was curated this year by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings). I haven’t been able to find [...]
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning. — Claude Shannon (1948) “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” Information is something we are all curious about but how accurately can we predict the future if [...]
A fascinating look at the America’s carefully regulated alcohol industry, which is starting to remake itself in the image of booze-soaked Britain. England has a drinking problem. Since 1990, teenage alcohol consumption has doubled. Since World War II, alcohol intake for the population as a whole has doubled, with a third of that increase occurring [...]
