Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 55

rogue hypnotists foiled

Back when I was working for the Indiana General Assembly, one member (and not the member who was, no lie, a radio psychic) became convinced that it was crucially important for the state to address, via statute, the problem of rogue hypnotists travelling the land, preying upon unsuspecting Hoosiers. He wasn't anti-hypnotist, mind you–he thought the government needed to protect people from unqualified hypnotists. If you ask me, real hypnotists are the ones we should be worried about (You...

Joe Sacco

Rachel Cooke interviews Joe Sacco in Guardian Review.

more is more

The second edition of The Elements of Statistical Learning (Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Jerome Friedman) is available as a PDF download here.

R in Action

On One R Tip A Day, an early review of Ron Kabacoff's R in Action.

S2

wir haben es endlich geschafft einen Online Poker Raum zu hacken.
Nie mehr bezahlen !!! Nach monatlicher Hackerei mit unserem Profi Hacker
Team.





Hackerei.

C McC

Interview of Cormac McCarthy in the WSJ.

S1

Zwei Herzen schlagen also in der Brust des passionierten Krimi-Sehers.

Susanne Beyer in Der Spiegel

by other means

n 1969, Britain lost a 25-year business war it had been fighting with America for control of the UK film market. In 1969, the British government capitulated to Washington in a secret deal, and removed the protections that, until then, had sustained British Cinema. When these protections were removed (primarily certain tax breaks and the Eady Levy) the British film studios were doomed. Associated British Pictures and the Rank Organisation quit film operations in 1970, and British Lion scaled b...

I got you babe

As part of the application to my screenwriting course at Harvard I ask the students to ask me a question. Most of the questions I've received are just fine – good indicators of what the student hopes to learn and sometimes what they misunderstand about what screenwriters do. Yesterday I got this question and it simply blew me away:

"Would you write a feature length screenplay if you knew it would not be produced?"

Oh my. That gets to the heart of so many things.

My immediate response is...

jobsworth

An important question, surprisingly often overlooked, is how you want to actually spend your time, day by day and hour by hour. In academia, you will immediately be plunged into hands-on science, and your drivers will be to start out on your career by getting results, publishing, networking, and building your reputation with a view to impressing your tenure committee. A career in industry may put more of an early emphasis on your organizational aptitude, people skills, powers of persuasion...