“naive Extrapolation And Collective Magical Thinking”

To continue the theme of our (cultural?) inability to learn from past mistakes, I think it is important to remember that we learn in order to get on successfully in a world that initially strikes us as the “blooming, buzzing confusion”...

Disadvantage Pornography

Presumably, the title of Jonathan Raban’s piece about the photographs of Dorothea Lange for the New York Review was entitled “American Pastoral” because, as his point of departure, he invokes William Empson’s Some Versions of...

Chutzpah in a Single Sentence

Given my use of adjectives such as “frivolous,” it should be clear to most readers that I do not take the content of Chris Matyszczyk’s Technically Incorrect blog for CNET News particularly seriously. As I observed when dropping...

On Giving And Taking Offense

I see from the BBC NEWS Web site that this is the twentieth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in response to the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses. I was reminded of the extent to which landmarks in...