Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 52

new game new game new game

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has a post on the role of computers in improving educational achievement in the young.

Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches look at the effects of a program that gave poor households a voucher to purchase a computer. ... Households with incomes directly below a cutoff level were given a voucher while households with incomes directly above the cutoff were not. Thus, households which were very similar were treated differently and this lets the authors...

Modernist fiction is that fiction that does not tease you...

Modernist fiction is that fiction that does not tease you into thinking that you can win.

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Stevens thou shouldst be living at this hour

He was a very imaginative claims man. I mean that he was never satisfied handling cases entirely according to routine. One of the
things in the old days was, if you had a contractor who defaulted, don't try to finish the contract or you'll lose your pants. Well, Stevens very often violated that principle, and he finished contracts and was always pretty successful. He was at that time and for many years before his death the dean of claims men in the whole country. I've often wondered how he cou...

War and War

Interviewed at the 2009 Venice festival, Yoav Donat, one of the actors [in Lebanon:], said: 'This is not a movie that makes you think: "I've just been to a movie." This is a movie that makes you feel like you've been to war.' Maoz has said his film is not a condemnation of Israel's policies, but a personal account of what he went through: 'The mistake I made is to call the film Lebanon because the Lebanon war is no different in its essence from any other war and for me any attempt to be...

From Dataviz, via Revolutions.Obama recently appointed ET...

From Dataviz, via Revolutions.

Obama recently appointed ET to the Recovery Independent Advisory Commission. Excelsior.

passive competence

And so, beginning in the early 1980s, I learned a new language. I began by purchasing Teach Yourself Czech. Taking advantage of the length (and increasingly welcome) absence of Wife #2, I devoted two hours a night to this book. Its method was old-fashioned and thus reassuringly familiar: page upon page of grammar, with the emphasis on the complicated conjugations and declensions of the Slavonic family of languages, interspersed with vocabulary, translations, pronunciation, important...

ephemeroi

Sir Kenneth Dover has died, obituary by Stephen Halliwell here. (Hat tip Jenny Davidson)

say it ain't so

Joel Spolsky is going to give up blogging on March 18, the 10th anniversary of Joel on Software. He has also written his last column for Inc., of which he says:

Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the house style by a very talented editor, Mike Hofman. When Mike got done with it, it was almost always better, but it never felt like my own words. I look back on those Inc. col...

boredom containers

The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-up,
with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom. Bunker face.

Deleuze Guattari 1986

Just as the face is a deterritorialized head, so the feet and the hands deterritorialize into
cyborganic admixtures: couplings of hand/tool and foot/ shoe. Of these, the foot/shoe is
the most basic foundation, the ground upon which the rest of the socialbody rests. By
standing on tw...

dispassion

Alissa Romanow interviews Gayatri Spivak, 9 Nov 2008, in Girodivite:

AR: Are you saying that you are not moderate in terms of your harshness?

GCS: In terms of my passion for my subject. It's not correct to expect that every student will share that passion. You remember the day I was teaching "Plato's Pharmacy." By the end of that I almost felt like I was somewhere else, that I wasn't even in that classroom. But I couldn't share this with my students, they had not read Plato from the inside...