My usual few years behind the curve, I picked up Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon yesterday. Right now I’m about a hundred pages in, and I’m wondering whether I should keep reading. The prose is flat. Stephenson keeps lathering-in in chunks of his background reading. Much of that material is interesting, but it’s applied with a […]
What with Tom Cruise and his Scientology-driven antipathy to psychiatric medicine in the news recently, it might be worth revisiting an old post about the claims that Scientology makes for its founder, the appalling L. Ron Hubbard.
Was there ever a more entertaining belief system embedded in a more ruthless organization? (Apart from the obvious one, […]
An anonymous correspondent (signing himself only as “The Moor”) sends me a snippet from what he assures me is a section of the majority opinion in Kelo vs New London that was cut at the last minute:
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property […]
Summer Vertigo is the counterpart to Winter Regret, the Christmastime feeling that produces lists of Books I Did Not Read This Year. At the beginning of the Summer break, teaching is done and it seems like there’s a bunch of free time open for you to tackle, oh, well just about any number of projects. […]
Steve Jobs announced that Apple will ditch the IBM PowerPC processor and begin using Intel chips in its computers as of next year.
We pause for a moment to allow Mac users to digest that sentence.
The suggestion that women in Saudi Arabia might, conceivably, be allowed to drive cars provokes squeals of outrage:
Consultative Council member Mohammad al-Zulfa’s proposal has unleashed a storm in this conservative country where the subject of women drivers remains taboo. Al-Zulfa’s cell phone now constantly rings with furious Saudis accusing him of encouraging women to commit […]
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