Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 34

Liège is, however, very much the sort of city I like - so...

Liège is, however, very much the sort of city I like - sombre, industrial, topographically melodramatic, utterly modern, and, occasionally, revolutionary, with a tendency to Jacquerie, General Strikes and such. None of these things are very popular at the moment, alas, so Liège is undergoing some tentative attempts to pull architecture tourists. And so there I went.

Owen Hatherley in Belgium

Obituary of Frank Kermode in the Guardian.

Obituary of Frank Kermode in the Guardian.

Statisticians hate small numbers (samples); now there is ...

Statisticians hate small numbers (samples); now there is another reason to hate small numbers. In one word, scams.

The FTC has shut down a scam in which the crooks have sneaked through 1.35 million fraudulent credit-card charges, each valued at $0.25 to $9 -- after letting it run for four years. What's shocking is that less than 5% of the victims (78,724) noticed and reported the charges. So, instead of stealing $1 million from one person, steal $1 from a million.

Kaiser Fung on Small Numbers a...

Granger causality is a standard statistical technique for...

Granger causality is a standard statistical technique for determining whether one time series is useful in forecasting another. It is important to bear in mind that the term causality is used in a statistical sense, and not in a philosophical one of structural causation. More precisely a variable A is said to Granger cause B if knowing the time paths of B and A together improve the forecast of B based on its own time path, thus providing a measure of incremental predictability. In our case...

the pooch in the hall

In short, for a serious cartoonist, a dog is not so much a warm, cuddly comfort as a self-inflicted wound.

Joe Sacco at NY Times Book Review on his four-legged 'friend'.

But if it can't be said exactly how Shakespeare happened,...

But if it can't be said exactly how Shakespeare happened, there are contexts that help to throw light. I want to glance at two of them here. Sixteenth-century Europe was changed by two movements: Shakespeare was the product of both Renaissance and Reformation. If his extraordinary generation of writers was not mute and inglorious, some of the credit has to go to the heroic humanist educators, headed by Erasmus and More. The New Learning, reaching back to classical literary and linguistic...

There is much more of interest here. I would describe th...

There is much more of interest here. I would describe this as a major, still uninternalized lesson of the recent crisis, with its roller coaster-rapid dips. In a highly specialized modern economy, it is much easier to prevent jobs from being destroyed than to create them again, at least assuming those are "good" jobs in the first place. (Yes, people thought they knew this but it's an even stronger difference than had been believed.) The U.S. auto bailout, for instance, worked better than ...

Trevor Butterworth interviews Lorin Stein, editor of the ...

Trevor Butterworth interviews Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, at Lunch with the FT.

The books continued not to appear

Trevor-Roper was captured by the second, and married into the first. Enemies invariably called him 'arrogant'. But it seems that he was never quite confident that he belonged in either world; he took on their manner with an exaggerated relish that suggests insecurity. In this, he was unlike the much tougher A.J.P. Taylor, who came to Oxford from middle-class Lancashire and was able to view the place with affectionate detachment. Taylor got on sturdily with his work. Trevor-Roper let himself b...

Gay liberation made its way, strangely, into the seminari...

Gay liberation made its way, strangely, into the seminaries. I have a letter from a friend, an Irish writer, sent in response to a piece I wrote for this paper about the Ferns Report, describing his visit to an Irish seminary in the 1980s.[*:] Since the Church was liberalising at that time, it would not have been unusual for writers to be invited to seminaries to speak. My friend had no intention of being shocking, or amusing. He spoke about literature, choosing the dullest subject for the...