Michael Giberson As observed at Freakonomics, my home town of Falls Church, Virginia is (at present) leading Amazon.com’s contest to be the “The Harry-est Town in America.” Freakonomics puts it concisely: Whichever town pre-orders the most copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will receive a $5,000 Amazon gift certificate, to be directed by …
Lynne Kiesling Speaking of music, the leader of my current favorite band, Franz Ferdinand, has written a book called Sound Bites, which is largely a compilation of his food columns for the Guardian. Alex was a chef before he was a rock star, and he writes with a lot of humor about his culinary experiences …
Michael Giberson On September 12, the AEI-Brookings Joint Center will be hosting a presentation of Cass Sunstein on his new book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Their announcement indicates that Professor Sunstein “will present an optimistic account of the human potential to aggregate information without resorting to prejudice and preconceptions.??? Just judging by the …
Lynne Kiesling Joanna at Fey Accompli has a nice post on Dr. Seuss and the political themes in his children’s books. I’ve always been disturbed by The Lorax, even when I was too young to understand why. Very interesting post.
Michael Giberson At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen points to a USA Today story about Penguin Books’ new Great Ideas series. The books offer extracts, the USA Today story called them “samplings”, from great non-fiction. The first twenty books include work by Seneca, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Orwell. The Penguin website invites visitors to vote on …
Lynne Kiesling John Moser has tagged me with the bibliophile meme (and he did so on a good day, as I am feeling contemplative): 1. How many books do I own? I estimate 1000, split between home and work pretty evenly and not counting the 500 or so additional books contributed by the KP Spouse. …
Michael Giberson Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying?which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements?books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . . . Books are also tragically isolating. While …
Lynne Kiesling Jonathan Wilde has this wonderful and annoying tendency to articulate things about which I have been ruminating before I have fully formed my ideas. In this post he does so about Neal Stephenson’s “radical libertarian views … he writes about libertarian themes – technological empowerment, data havens, free banking, polycentric law, anonymous digital …
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