Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 61

the story behind the election

Andrew Gelman and John Sides have an article in the Boston Review analyzing Obama's victory, here.

radical thought

Probably the most noble thing a publisher can possibly do is provide cheap paperback editions of important texts. All the first editions and Folio press embossed hardbacks in the world are, culturally if not financially, worth less than a single bundle of 1960s Penguin Classics, and the line of low-budget purveyors of enlightenment is a worthy and laudable one. From the Everyman's Library editions of the 1900s-40s, with their arts & crafts aesthetic, aimed clearly at autodidacts rather than scho

that clinking clanking sound again

Greg Butler has drawn my attention to an article in the NYT on Kickstarter, a new method for raising funds for the arts, here.

Why didn't they ask Gelman?

Reformers like Cerf, Klein, Weisberg, and even Secretary Duncan often use the term "value-added scores" to refer to how they would quantify the teacher evaluation process. It is a phrase that sends chills down the spine of most teachers'-union officials. If, say, a student started the school year rated in the fortieth percentile in reading and the fiftieth percentile in math, and ended the year in the sixtieth percentile in both, then the teacher has "added value" that can be reduced to a number

disparition

He tried to show what it was like to read a book and what the thinking mind looked like in the act of writing.

He wrote compellingly about effort, about difficulty, about struggle, about failure, about incoherency, about instability, tension, waste, self-consciousness, incompleteness, process . . .


Mithridates on the critic Richard Poirier, who has just died.

codes of the underworld

The signaling problems faced by criminals are unusual in the following regard. On one hand they wish to signal a certain untrustworthiness, namely that they are criminals in the first place. This is useful for both meeting other criminals and also for intimidating potential victims. On the other hand, the criminals wish to signal that they are potentially cooperative, for the purpose of working with other criminals. Sending these dual signals isn't easy and Gambetta well understands the comp

proportioned like an egge

In the river of Panuco there is a fish like a calfe, the Spanyards call it a Mallatin, hee hath a stone in his head, which the Indians use for the disease of the Collicke, in the night he commeth on land, and eateth grasse. I have eaten of it, and it eateth not much unlike to bacon. From thence we were sent to Mexico, which is 90 leagues from Panuco. In our way thither, 20 leagues from the sea side, I did see white Crabs running up & downe the sands, I have eaten of them, and they be very good m

virtuosi and musicians

Via Marginal Revolution, Glenn Gould on Sviatoslav Richter.

mind the gap

American conservatives have, I gather, been attacking the NHS. (Guardian)

There's something they somehow miss.

If you live in America and happen not to have health insurance, it's complicated to organise treatment. By 'complicated' I mean that you might well be able to clear the bureaucratic hurdles if you had spent the last 6 months training for a marathon, were in peak physical and mental condition - but if you are, um, you know, sick, you are unlikely to have mental and physical stamina requir

eliminative naturalism

K-Punk on Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint.

<>Some of Dick's most powerful passages are those in which there is an ontological interrugnum: a traumatic unworlding is not yet given a narrative motivation; a unresolved space that awaits reincorporation into another Symbolic regime. In Time Out Of Joint, the interregnum takes the form of an extraordinary scene in which the seemingly dull objects of quotidian naturalism - the gas station and the motel - act almost like a negative version of the lamp-</>