For a few years in graduate school I wrote a regular column for the Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s main student newspaper. I got into a bit of trouble once or twice over it, notably for a piece I wrote out of irritation with the local chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ.
I was reminded of this […]
It’s fifty years since the death of mathematician, code-breaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing. Turing committed suicide after being forced to take estrogen for a year to “cure” him of his homosexuality. I read Andrew Hodges’ excellent biography of Turing when I was in College. I remember Hodges noting that from about 1935 to his […]
With all the hoopla over D-Day remembrances, I found myself wondering whether remembering the anniversary had become more or less important in the last twenty years. To this end, I spent twenty minutes getting LexisNexis to email me New York Times stories mentioning D-Day since 1980, running it through the world’s kludgiest Perl script […]
The best-selling song in Ireland at the moment is a strike for local terms of abuse over international ones. A group from Cork—Ireland’s second-largest city, its real capital, and my home town—is dominating the charts with “The Langer,” outselling such international cursers as Eamon and Frankee. “Langer” is a Cork term meaning—well, it can mean […]
Teresa Nielsen Hayden takes a contrarian line on a story about Michael Gunn, an English student who got caught for plagiarism but is now suing because claims he was not informed it was wrong and was shocked—shocked—to be told it was. “I hold my hands up. I did plagiarise. I never dreamt it was a […]
As a devotee of structured procrastination I am constantly on the lookout for things to be doing instead of whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. As long as what you’re doing has some value (even if it has less value than what you’re supposed to be doing) then you can end up accomplishing […]
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