Let Us Now Praise Editors
Me, I'm lucky—I work with a great editor and an even better copy editor. It's win-win.
LATEST ADDITIONS
Continue Reading »
Ins and Outs
<i><b>Let's Play the Caption Game!</i></b>
Living Photographs
Arthur Mole and John Thomas arranged thousands of soldiers, reservists, and nurses into various patriotic symbols and photographed them from above—a description which, while being accurate, doesn't prepare you for their work.
A Prehistory of the Atomic Age
There's a new biography of Leo Szilard, the physicist who proposed the Strangelovian "doomsday weapon."
On Farting: Language and Laughter In the Middle Ages
Who am I to critique somebody else's field of study?
Steamin' in the Rain
It's Monday. It's raining. And people, tourists in particular, (excuse me, why don’t you just poke out the other eye while you're at it!) cannot walk with umbrellas, so let’s talk Ticketmaster.
Format Wars
Woulda, coulda, shoulda—some "superior" formats just didn't achieve dominance.
Why Do They Hate Us?
Mohsin Hamid, author of <I>The Reluctant Fundamentalist</I>, was asked on a book tour, "So tell me, sir. Why do they hate us?" Having spent half his life in America, the Pakistani writer had to think about who "us" and "they" were. This fine essay is the result of that thinking.
Are there times when you just don't want to listen to music? Why not?
Sometimes, we don't listen to music for days at a time, just so it sounds fresh again when we finally do. And sometimes we just yearn for something better and are willing to hit pause until we discover it. Are there times when you just don't want to listen to music? Why not?
The THD Wars Are Over?
Back in the bad old pioneer days of high fidelity, the 1960s and early 1970s, amplifier manufacturers embarked on a specifications war, claiming ever lower percentages of total harmonic distortion. But, as J. Gordon Holt presciently pointed out in the 1960s, without reference to the spectrum of the distortion harmonics, the actual percentage was not in itself a reliable indicator of an amplifier's sound quality. And as those early low-THD models had distortion spectra that were heavily biased toward the sonically objectionable fifth, seventh, and ninth harmonics, and suffered from other related ills, they tended to sound quite nasty.
Continue Reading »