LATEST ADDITIONS

Thirty-five years ago this month, the first issue of a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/708">new audio magazine</A>&mdash;cover price 50 cents&mdash;cautiously made its way out of a Philadelphia suburb. Its black'n'white cover featured a chessboard adorned with tubes and XLR plugs. Its 20 advertising-free pages included a feature on <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/historical/108">how to write an ad</A> for an audio product, which had been penned by one Lucius Wordburger, a footnote helpfully pointing out that this was the <I>nom de plume</I> for one <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/historical/712">J. Gordon Holt</A>, "who wishes to remain anonymous."

They bend the rules.

Jack London's forgotten <I>The Road</I>.

Eugene Starostin and Gert van der Heijde have solved a 75-year-old conundrum by developing tools to predict the three dimensional form a M&#246;bius strip will take.

Jason Moran finished a week at the Jazz Standard in New York City last night and confirmed his standing, at age 32, as <I>the</I> jazz pianist of our times. A few years ago, I saw Moran playing in duet at Merkin Hall with Andrew Hill, one of his mentors, more than twice his age. Afterward, a friend of mine, a trumpeter just a little older than Moran, made a sharp observation about their respective generations: Hill, a leading avant-gardist from the ‘60s then undergoing a renaissance, played in one style, his style; Moran played in many styles, all styles. Though he didn’t put it in these terms, Hill (who recently died of cancer) was the jazz equivalent of an abstract expressionist painter (say, Franz Kline or Robert Motherwell), while Moran is the supreme post-modernist (say, Robert Rauschenberg) who appropriates everything around him, including ready-made objects, and somehow makes it all his own.

Personally, I've enjoyed the Potter books finding the themes more archetypal than "derivative," but <I>chacun &#225; son go&#251;t</I>, ya know? What I found interesting about Ron Charles' rant was this pithy argument: "We're experiencing the literary equivalent of a loss of biodiversity." In 1994, according to a Stanford survey, over 70% of fiction sales were from just five authors.