S'been awhile since I made a deposit in the blogosphere -- though Mango Haiku is pretty far off anyone's sphere. One thing I meant to do but couldn't get to for Linguistics-test related reasons was writing a review of John Lanchester's I.O.U. Take home point: financial gurus are the abstract philosophers of our age, who wield their computers in a monetary netherworld -- basically they work the shadow puppets in our cave -- to create havoc in the real-world which appears to follow different rules than the world of forms where the perfect money exists; the kind that has no risks. Best pull quote (from memory): The bailouts and other actions of the government amount to "socialism for the rich." Great book -- it takes a novelist like Lanchester to make derivatives accessible to everyone. (Oh, basically the philosophical conundrum that the banks ran in to is that risk can't disappear -- sooner or later risk is risk.

Kristin Espeland Gourlay is all over the place on the web: she launched the Ohio River Radio Consortium, organized, emceed, and recorded a conference that brought together scientists and journalists, was featured on Current.org, and recently did an hour on State of Affairs (by affairs, I believe they mean 'general happenings').




Things to read:

My latest essay appeared at the Bygone Bureau. It's about a notebook that I used to carry about and annoy people with. Names, places and events have been changed and tweaked for those in the know. (And, like, certain good bits were left out because they are way too complicated.)




The internet seems to be a-buzz about this article, but in case you missed it the Vanity Fair article on Roger Ebert is excellent. Also, his remarks on the article. And his post about his new/old voice.

"Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals." -- great article from the New Yorker, and useful for the class I'm teaching, about what might be called the "depression industry". Recently there have been some very useful articles for my students -- this NY Times article, "The Americanization of Mental Illness," is also interesting.

If you think algorithms are sexy this article about Google should do it for you.