The iWorld
From Andrew Sullivan's column in the Times of London : I was visiting New York last week and noticed something I’d never thought I’d say abo...
NYPL Digital Gallery
From the New York Times : Say you start your exploration with one of the two images that open the library's Digital Gallery, a detail from a...
Huck's Raft
From Joyce Carol Oates' review of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood , by Steven Mintz: Huck's Raft is an inspired title for a bo...
"21 for 21"
From today's New York Times : The homemade video captures the first hour after the stroke of midnight when the birthday boy turned 21 and co...
Speak, Memory
Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, ...
From the Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl This site has photographs from the files of the Farm Security Administration and interviews with men and women who experienced...
3009 links
3009 students: Here are the links. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Current conditions for migrant workers Agricultural Worker Health Ini...
The Opal Petty story
3703 students: When you see what happens to Darl, consider the following: Opal Petty, whose lawsuit over her 51-year involuntary commitment ...
Perfect Etiquette (1879)
Moving books between my home and my office, I rediscovered a pamphlet that I bought some years ago at a library sale: Perfect Etiquette; Or,...
The front table
From today's New York Times : The once humble conventions of book display--the neighborhood bookstore window, the recommended-books table ne...
Oprah picks Faulkner
From Reuters: Talkshow host Oprah Winfrey propelled Nobel-prize winning author William Faulkner up the bestseller list on Saturday, proving ...
"Human rights" and other four-letter words
It's remarkable that I find myself in agreement with a Wall Street Journal editorial, but today I do. From the WSJ (June 15): Microsoft's ...
There'll always be an England
From the Chicago Tribune : Watch out for "happy slapping," the latest youth craze to sweep Britain. It's not a new dance step or even a new ...
"Zero content"
Guitarist Ry Cooder: "What do you need another mall for?" he went on. "In L.A., that’s all they ever have built. They cut up the Brown Derby...
Shelby Foote
From the AP obituary for historian Shelby Foote: Early in his career, Foote took up the habit of writing by hand with an old-fashioned dippe...
"Weddings and Celebrations"
The "Weddings and Celebrations" section of the Sunday New York Times makes for interesting reading. The details of the ceremonies sometimes...
London
From a statement by Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London: This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not ai...
Auden, London
The novelist Ian McEwan, writing in the New York Times : In Auden's famous poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts," the tragedy of Icarus falling from ...
"Big"
From an interview with James W. Keyes, chief executive of 7-Eleven, marking the return of 7-Eleven to Manhattan: Q: Aside from the Slurpee,...
We're not afraid
A response to London: Photos of people saying "We're not afraid," at http://www.werenotafraid.com/ .
Arts and science
In the course of the interview described here , Van Dyke Parks quotes John Maeda, professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Laborato...
Some have gone and some remain
I wrote a few weeks ago about the consolation of knowing that places from one's past are still as they were. On vacation with my family last...
Attention
From an Ellen Goodman column, "A snail mail tale" : How do you describe the times we live in, so connected and yet fractured? Linda Stone, a...
Andrew Sullivan on self-esteem
The above post made me think of Andrew Sullivan's essay "Self-Esteem: Why we need less of it," which touches on the disconnect between stude...
Press Your Luck
Larsen was winning so much money that the running total on his digital contestant podium no longer had sufficient enough real estate to disp...
Getting the truth
Six months before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison broke into public view, a small and fairly obscure private association of United States Ma...
High Water Everywhere
Oh Lordy, women and grown men drown Oh, women and children sinkin' down [spoken: Lord have mercy] I couldn't see nobody's home and wasn't no...
Laughter and tears
From Andrew Sullivan : "The good news is--and it's hard for some to see it now--that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coa...
Sort of scary
When the real news sounds like what follows, I wonder: do we still need The Onion ? As President Bush battled criticism over the response to...
"White-Collar Hell"
Q: Nickel and Dimed has become a standard reading assignment for undergraduates over the past few years, and some of that audience must now...