David Weinberger's Blog, page 7

Pizza, Gluten, String Theory

For the second time in the past month and the second time in my life, I just made no-knead pizza dough. It has thrown my conceptual world into a tizzy. Since I was about 20 years old, I’ve made pizza by making a dough, kneading it, and cooking it. People (= my wife) claim to […]

Leaving AOL

Verizon three days ago sold Yahoo and AOL for a measly $5B.  The “measly” is not sarcastic. Twenty years ago, Yahoo was worth $125B. Verizon bought Yahoo in 2016 for $4.8B. AOL was once worth $200B, but Verizon bought it in 2015 for $4.4B. Which means Verizon lost $4.2B in total in the sale of both companies.  The private equity […]

The Oxford Apostrophe

As some of you know, I have been a tireless advocate for the Oxford Apostrophe that adds an extra apostrophe after the final apostrophed word in a series. Failing that, the OA calls for the totally needless insertion of apostrophes. I know you mocked me for it; I could hear you all snickering during my every […]

Three flavors of Buridan’s Ass

The original Buridan's Ass is a philosophical fable...

How I cancelled Mary Poppins

I have a confession: In 1982, I cancelled Mary Poppins. The book’s beloved author, P.L. Travers, had just released a new version that removed some of the ethnic stereotypes that were in the original —I remember that “Eskimos” and Africans were caricatures, and I think there were more. I was freelancing for Macleans at the […]

Unpredictable hope

I just briefly posted at Psychology Today about the way hope has been welcomely intruding as grief sometimes does. CC0 image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

The Uncanny Stepford Valley

You’ve probably heard about MyHeritage.com‘s DeepNostalgia service that animates photos of faces. I’ve just posted at Psychology Today about the new type of uncanniness it induces, even though the animations of the individual photos I think pretty well escape The uncanny Value. Here’s a sample from the MyHeritage site: And here’s a thread of artworks […]

Free “The Realist”

I just stumbled across an open access archive of 146 issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s 1960s political and cultural satire magazine. Thanks, JSTOR! I read it when I was in high school and college in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was far more savage than MAD magazine, more explicit in topics and language, […]

The rise of the dash

Lauren Oyler’s “The Case for Semicolons” in the NY Times Magazine is an entertaining defense of a punctuation mark that has, alas, been losing steam. But I was struck by her use of em dashes in the articles, for I am an enthusiast of semicolons who over-uses em dashes, as do many of us. Em […]

The dying of meteors

I had never heard of meteor scatter communications before. After reading the Wikipedia article, I can only say it is beautiful. Literally. Messages bouncing off the ionized trails of meteorites at the end of their journey? It’s haunting, like the Harmony of the Spheres.