LATEST ADDITIONS

Me, I'm lucky—I work with a great editor and an even better copy editor. It's win-win.

<i><b>Let's Play the Caption Game!</i></b>

Arthur Mole and John Thomas arranged thousands of soldiers, reservists, and nurses into various patriotic symbols and photographed them from above&mdash;a description which, while being accurate, doesn't prepare you for their work.

There's a new biography of Leo Szilard, the physicist who proposed the Strangelovian "doomsday weapon."

Who am I to critique somebody else's field of study?

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.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda&mdash;some "superior" formats just didn't achieve dominance.

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.

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?

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.