Books and movies are two different languages. To compare the two is like comparing pottery and stained glass.
–Russel Banks
Probably half the movies made in Hollywood are adaptations of stories that originally appeared as novels, nonfiction books, comic books, short stories, plays, poems, or what have you. Hollywood studios and production companies aggressively scan major magazines […]
Bill Newsome, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, has spent the last twenty years studying how neurons encode information and how they use it to make decisions about the world.
But Newsome is obsessed with a lingering question: How does consciousness arise from brain function? He feels the best way to answer that […]
“What’s another word for thesaurus?”
–Steven Wright
Word Mania
Are you just plain sick of a word, like “empowerment,” or an expression, like the vaguely obscene “bottom line”? Do you wish they’d just go away? You can nominate them for banishment at The Banished Words List.
Try a new add-in dictionary if you’re sick of Microsoft’s. WordWeb Pro, is […]
For all of today’s up-to-the-second economic analysis, how are Americans actually doing?
The New York Times Op-Ed page asked writers to provide snapshots of their local economies over the course of the year.
Here is Richard Dooling’s second dispatch on the state of the economy in Nebraska: Nebraska’s Nostalgia Trap. I’ll be doing two more columns […]
For all of today’s up-to-the-second economic analysis, how are Americans actually doing?
The New York Times Op-Ed page asked writers to provide snapshots of their local economies over the course of the year.
Richard Dooling’s first economic postcard from Omaha: Revenge of the Cornhuskers, published Sunday, 2 October 2005.
“Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.”
–Walter Benjamin
Great Quotations
Brainy Quote is one of the best sites on the Internet for finding an apt quotation or browsing by author or topic.
Michael Moncur’s The Quotations Page is also good, but lately it’s clotted with pop-up […]
Neuroscience and brain imaging continue to appear almost daily in the mainstream press. Lately, the focus is on lie detection and other forensic applications for functional brain imaging. See, for example, Don’t Even Think About Lying in the January 2006 issue of Wired Magazine and Looking For The Lie in the New York Times Magazine […]
Dictionaries For Professional Writers
“Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.”–Paul Valery
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is not new any more (1993), but it’s still the best […]
2005 BEST BOOKS - NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Fiction
Kafka On The Shore, by Haruki Murakami
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
Prep: A Novel, by Curtis Sittenfeld
Saturday, by Ian McEwan
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill
Nonfiction
The Assassin’s Gate: America In Iraq, by George Packer
De Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan
The Lost Painting, by Jonathan Harr
Postwar: A History […]
2005 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS
Fiction
Europe Central, by William T. Vollman (Winner!)
The March, by E.L. Doctorow
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill
Trance, by Chrisopher Sorrentino
Holy Skirts, by Rene Steinke
Nonfiction
The Year Of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (Winner!)
Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, by Leo Damrosch
102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight […]
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