The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) last month launched a similar probe into the prices of ebooks, which can cost more than twice as much as their printed cousins.
A new archive of letters, pictures and Abdul Karim’s “lost diary”, held secretly by his family for more than a century, sheds new light on their relationship
For all their positive aspects, arts funding bodies today are actually blunting the entrepreneurial skills of creative people.
Thursday, 24 February 2011
Alain de Botton’s general point stands: professional anxieties about the perils of popularisation are not new, nor is the hunger of the average reader for philosophical sustenance.
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
If there was any doubt before, there is no longer now: Qaddafi has explicitly declared intention to massacre his own people!
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
I’m both a lawyer and a poetry critic, so asking me to discuss this book would seem to present an especially harmonious pairing of subject and analyst—like handing an animal cracker recipe to a zoologist-pastry chef.
Obama’s ideas and convictions do not themselves explain his performance as president. It is Obama’s political skills, not his ideas, that seem to be his problem. Kloppenberg provides an excellent summary of the pragmatic tradition–a tradition rooted in the belief that there are no eternal truths, that all ideas and convictions must meet the test of usefulness. (Or, as James put it, ideas have to “work.”)
We simply don’t know whether it was part of a residence or an official building, and we can’t even say whether the owner or owners were Jewish, Christian, or pagan. The date is not secure either, although the excavator proposes about AD 300…
Saturday, 19 February 2011
Nor am I the only one who has stashed away files of these lists, ambitiously started, rarely completed. But based on the attestations of my wife, my friends and everyone else I know, I may be more assiduous about list-following than most.
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
We are already participating in a Goat Island workshop. Collaborating through words, sounds, touch, texture, viewing, thinking. The material is there to be received, processed, transformed.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
How did [Aaron] Barr, a man with long experience in security and intelligence, come to spend his days as a CEO e-stalking clients and their wives on Facebook? Why did he start performing “reconnaissance” on the largest nuclear power company in the US? Why did he suggest pressuring corporate critics to shut up, even as he privately insisted that corporations “suck the lifeblood out of humanity”? And why did he launch his ill-fated investigation into Anonymous, one which may well have destroyed his company and damaged his career?
Thanks to his leaked e-mails, the downward spiral is easy enough to retrace. Barr was under tremendous pressure to bring in cash, pressure which began on November 23, 2009.
That’s when Barr started the CEO job at HBGary Federal. Its parent company, the security firm HBGary, wanted a separate firm to handle government work and the clearances that went with it, and Barr was brought in from Northrup Grumman to launch the operation.
In an e-mail announcing Barr’s move, HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund told his company that “these two are A+ players in the DoD contracting space and are able to ‘walk the halls’ in customer spaces. Some very big players made offers to Ted and Aaron last week, and instead they chose HBGary. This reflects extremely well on our company. ‘A’ players attract ‘A’ players.”
Barr at first loved the job. In December, he sent an e-mail at 1:30am; it was the “3rd night in a row I have woken up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep because my mind is racing. It’s nice to be excited about work, but I need some sleep.”
My first impression of Dean was of a young The Situation—ripped, funny as shit, with spiked hair—a Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Writers began framing their autobiographies, selecting experiences that would contribute to an overall narrative shape of their choosing. The resulting books were as much studies of memory and memory’s mishaps and strangenesses as they were records of lives.
As an artist who was also an “intellectual” performer, a woman who played the man, and a single woman whose life reads like an adventure novel Cushman deeply influenced American culture in the time of great upheaval around the Civil War.
For Whittemore, selecting Williams as a biographical subject, set a tone for his own memoir. With biographical subjects, issues of transference can be crucial, especially if the life of the subject resonates with aspects of one’s own personal life.
