LATEST ADDITIONS

Joshua Ferris ponders the absence of work in literature. We spend most of our lives doing it, but it's MIA on the pages—unless you're a soldier, whaler, or private eye.

Is it me or does Phil Spector, the Wall–of–Sound inventor turned murder suspect, look more and more like a middle aged woman, particularly with his new blonde doo. If I were his lawyer I might have asked that he not change his hairstyle from notoriously weird to super weird on the eve of the trial. The photos, CNN.com has some doozies, that are really, really strange. Him with that Doris Day gone mad hair waving a pistol around demanding God knows what? Whatever the verdict, the man needs supervision.

I really like this animated short. I don't know who produced it, but he or she tells a nice story in just over two minutes.

In an article titled, "This Boot Was Made for Jazzin'," found in our April 2007 issue, Thomas Conrad tells us that today's most important European jazz musicians are coming from Italy. It was in that article that I was introduced to the young wonders, saxophonist Francesco Cafiso (18), and pianists, Giovanni Guidi (22) and Alessandro Lanzoni (15). These young men live within a musical landscape nurtured by guys like Gianni Basso (75) and Renato Sellani (81), who, according to Conrad, are "sounding better than ever." I'm not quite sure why, but it thrills me to know that such language, art, and life are being shared between people separated by so many years. Perhaps I see it as some evidence that time is only time. And what does that mean to me? Again, I don't know.

Jerome Harris sends along this <I>Uncyclopedia</I> definition of "conductor."

Joshua Kosman suggests the NYP give up its search for a music director and run the Philharmonic on the "wiki model."

Turns out that it's because it's too noisy during the daytime for mating calls to be heard. Modern life has us all staying up later. Except for those of a certain <A HREF="http://www.history-magazine.com/dinner2.html">class</A&gt;, of course.

<A HREF="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto">… Interpreter"</A> in <I>The New Yorker</I>, about Dan Everett's work on the Pirah, has generated a lot of discussion on the Interwebs. The MIT linguists, who subscribe to the Chomskyan <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar">universal grammar theory</A>, fired <A HREF="http://www.physorg.com/news96558379.html">back</A&gt;. Now, Vera da Silva Sinha and Chris Sinha, two anthropologists who have done fieldwork with another Amazonian community and who have visited the Pirah, chime in.

<I>Business Week</I>'s Pallavi Gogoi offers a fascinating analysis of how Wal-Mart's decision to offer a sub-$1000 42" plasma TV last Christmas ruined the holiday for the entire retail electronics industry.

Read Matt Taibbi's obituary of Boris Yeltsin.