Wes Phillips

Born in poverty on the outskirts of Barquisimeto in the Venezuelan interior, Gustavo Dudamel has become what Simon Rattle calls "the most astonishingly gifted conductor I have ever come across."

The Grolier Club has mounted an exhibition that takes miniature books bigtime.

Good news for those of us on deadline.

"my youth i shall never forget

but there s nothing i really regret


wotthehell wotthehell

there s a dance in the old dame yet


toujours gai toujours gai"

Why does a hive's queen act so, um, unladylike? It turns out that's an interesting question—and not the only one.

Peeved at Clippy the annoying talking paperclip in MS Word? If you're rude to him, he'll tell you how to turn him off. Programmers call this unhappy user detection.

Taylor Dinerman offers an appreciation of Heinlein on the occasion of his centenary. Of course, he conveniently skips over that embarrassing incest novel Time Enough for Love, but I've always marveled that that one raised eyebrows at all. After all, the heroes of "All">http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~mfedder/zombies.html">"All You Zombies" (considered by some to be the best time travel story ever—although I confess to being thoroughly creeped out by it) and "By">http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/scifi/byhisbootstraps.pdf">"By His Bootstraps" go considerably further than traveling back in time to seduce their mothers.