Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 42

books overfurnish a room

New Yorkers.

Jenny Davidson is trying to get rid of books. Would happily give them to anyone willing to pick up (she's up by Columbia). If you're interested, get in touch.

strawberries & pims

When I was at Oxford, a very long time ago, I took out a life membership to the Oxford Union for something like £70. This would have worked out as a terrific bargain by now if I spent more time in Oxford - once you take your degree(s) you're no longer entitled to go back to your old college(s) and hang out in the Common Room(s) to which you once belonged, and the Union is centrally located. As it happens, I normally go back only to see Best Dentist in the World. As an undergraduate and grad...

electoral reform

Paddy Allen explains AV.

oases

WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it's a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it's what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to ...

MMMMMMMMMM

more subtly invidious is the simple fact that people are so unused to seeing women appointed to the court that it's somehow a scandal to see two of them named in a row. Two women and we're talking about systematic discrimination. And that reaction means that even though the coin says there's an even chance that Obama's next pick will be a woman also, there's probably not an even chance of it, as he'll have to prove that he's not favoring women. After all, it's one thing to appoint 101 men in ...

the house style

Mark Liberman finds a site, Onlinestylebooks.com, that lets you search 43 stylebooks at once:

Surveying this explicit variety of sources may help to avoid an otherwise-natural confusion. These stylebooks are not about the nature of (the formal written variety of) the English language: each of them documents (aspects of) one organization's policy about how to represent this language in writing, typically covering a limited set of cases that are both reasonably common and somewhat variable in...

deanery

Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy on Elena Kagan's qualification to be Supreme Court justice:

The real flaw in Campos' and Mirengoff's argument is the implicit assumption that being an outstanding dean requires you to be an outstanding scholar. It doesn't.

The job of dean is primarily managerial and political. The dean has to manage the faculty and staff, maintain good relations with the university, and raise money. He or she must be a good judge of others' scholarship, since she plays a...

Another, fairly astonishing Postconstructivist scheme is ...

Another, fairly astonishing Postconstructivist scheme is the Svirstroy Housing Complex, finished as late as 1938, in bare concrete and red render, with a notably un-Stalinist simplicity, but with lots of highly un-Constructivist fluting. Here though, symmetry has prevailed, affected only slightly by the glass infilling of balconies indulged in by several residents - something done, I'm told, in order to create a free second refrigerator.

Owen Hatherley on the architecture of St Petersburg.

one's own Brain

When, in the 1760s, the Earl of Hardwicke attempted to commission Gainsborough to paint a view for him, the artist replied:

Mr Gainsborough presents his Humble respects to Lord Hardwicke; and shall always think it an honor to be employ'd in any thing for his Lordship; but with regard to real Views from Nature in this Country, he has never seen any Place that affords a Subject equal to the poorest imitations of Gaspar or Claude. Paul Sanby is the only Man of Genius, he believes, who has...

ppv v fp

When asked about the accuracy of a mammogram, doctors cite the "false positive rate". Ignore the false positive rate, what patients really need to know is the "positive predictive value" (PPV), that is, the chance of having breast cancer given that one has a positive mammogram.

The PPV for mammography is 9 percent. Nine percent! You heard right. For every 100 patients who test positive, only 9 have breast cancer, the other 91 do not. This may sound like a travesty but it's easily explained...