You will likely have heard by now that George Best — Northern Ireland international, star of Manchester United and, later, player for a long list of increasingly obscure clubs — has died. Best was a weak and pitiable alcoholic, and also one of the greatest footballers ever to grace a pitch. My own thoughts on [...]

Sorry, this is not a post proclaiming a political theory of everything. It’s a note saying “‘Tis done!” I picked up Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World sooner than I thought and finished it up right quick.
Previous posts on the Baroque Cycle are here, here, here and here. The argument of the trilogy and [...]

Malcolm Gladwell tells great stories. In Blink, his latest book, he relates how the Getty Museum nearly bought an amazing forgery, why Warren Harding became US president, how to tell if a married couple will divorce and why coronary care can improve if doctors have less information.

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Andrew Brown points us to an illuminating article by Bernard Nežmah on swearing in Serbian. Though the article is five years old, I daresay its theme is timeless.
According to Nežmah’s piece — published in Central Europe Review or, as we must now call it, Transitions Online — the Serbian language is blessed with a dazzling, [...]

I’m probably the last blogger still reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, and chances are good that I won’t take on the third part, The System of the World, immediately after finishing the second, The Confusion. Not because the books aren’t good, just that it is a lot to read consecutively.
The good news is that the [...]

Don’t pick of a copy of Stasiland, by Anna Funder, if you have work to do. I did the first time, and I nearly missed a deadline. I did it again this morning, intending to write a review, and my productivity dropped like a rock again. Consider yourselves warned.

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Alright, that’s not a particularly clever headline. I know you have probably read it a couple of hundred times in the course of the last years if you at all opened the sports section of your newspaper of choice in the month of July. But with only days left to the official retirement of Lance [...]

Interesting piece today in the New York Times (reg. req.) on Germans having themselves cremated in the Netherlands. Wait; I should be more precise lest I alarm you — the article is about Germans arranging to have themselves cremated later. If you want to have your corpse burnt, the Dutch will do it with a [...]

I was reading one of the Sueddeutsche books at lunch, and one of the characters, a Dutchman as it happens, casually drops into the conversation, “Poland has not yet perished.” It’s the opening line of the Polish national anthem, and one of those catchphrases of the culture, a hoary cliche, but one that despite everything [...]

Apart from the fact that the alleged origin of the prize exhibit at Art Basle - a bar of soap, displayed on a square of black velvet, purportedly made from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s fat, which was removed during liposuction - may be in bad taste in terms of historical precedents, something else struck [...]