Last week I had a couple of snakebit days, the kind that are my fault entirely – like leaving (almost) the house with no makeup and no shoes. On one of these days I took a package to an UPS store, found out I would pay $50 to send a $50 present, decided what the […]
Ann
Apparently we’re feminine/ist this week, or so far Emma and I are. I want to argue about the Finkbeiner Test. The test began with a heroic vow: I would write a profile of a woman scientist without the clichés that litter these profiles. The test took off when Christie wrote a post about my post […]
Helen: Ann, we’re here because you said you hate moors. I am currently having a love affair with moors, so I want to know: Why? Also, we’re here because I suspect this will give us an opportunity to talk about how much we hate Wuthering Heights. Unless you like Wuthering Heights. Do you like Wuthering […]
This first ran March 9, 2011. I haven’t changed my mind. Crows take care of each other, talk constantly, have their enemies lists, are smart, are wicked, and remind me a lot of the rest of us.“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a […]
So, LWON is eclipsing, on into next week. And if the internet is to be believed, half the country will be pulled north and the other half south and they’ll converge in the middle, on the path of totality. It’s charming, how a population that normally lives at arm’s length from earthly reality — milk […]
Ann: Please meet Adam Rogers. He wrote a story about DARPA looking for solutions to the credibility problems of social science, only what I’m calling “solutions to credibility problems,” he called bullshit detection. First, social science’s credibility problems. Here’s the way I said it in 2015: Start with any question involving human behavior or motivation and […]
This ran not that long ago, August 23, 2016. But I feel it should be run again because it has an important update. Recently, Helen and I made mint lemonade again, this time with Jenny. As the post suggests, we blended-and-spigoted at the same time, and instead of demarara sugar, we used white. The pond scum […]
I’d been reading a book by Colm Tóibín called House of Names. The house is the House of Atreus; Tóibín explained through a character why he substituted “names,” but I didn’t understand it. He took the story pretty faithfully from the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes about one or all members of the family. […]