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Showing posts from April, 2013

My Next Climate Video Unveiled

This time I narrated it myself. Probably again quite amateurish, but I think it came out reasonably well considering my lack of experience. Check it out: Comments or suggestions appreciated, though please remember I'm still a noob at this stuff.

Take Me Out to the Ball Etc

Catching a Nats game this evening.

True Facts

Ze Frank, master of YouTube:

Middlemarch Finished

This was a couple weeks ago, so much that I'm already almost through my next audiobook (Anthony Beevor's Second World War ), but I do want to note that Middlemarch  was a doozy. So, so good. I'm certain that I can't have had any thoughts that haven't been already been had better and sharper, so I won't bother with more than a few disconnected points. 1) As I just said, it was stupendously good. The only thing I can think to compare it to is War and Peace . Slightly less epic scale, but balanced by more penetrating psychological insight, more fully realized characters, better plotting, and less goofy historical theorizing. This is a work of extreme skill and brilliance. 2) That said, there were slightly too many coincidences driving the plot for my taste. The very last one, where one character walks in on two others having a conversation and comes away with what seemed like an unjustified idea of what was happening, grated quite a bit. (I suspect this is just

Book Review: "The Alchemists," by Neil Irwin

A mass unemployment crisis stretching across most of the developed world, reaching Great Depression levels of misery in Greece and Spain, would likely be thought strange by an economist visitor from 2004. After all, all the top central bankers of the world were back then attending self-congratulatory conferences about the “Great Moderation,” dedicated to explaining how they had this economy stuff licked. And while that is easy to mock in hindsight, it wasn’t an insane belief! After all, after the Great Depression economists developed a widely-accepted theoretical framework for depressions; everyone from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman agreed that while they might have many disagreements on things like taxation or trade policy, depressions at least were a solved problem. For especially in modern service-based economies, money goes in circles: my spending is your income, and vice versa. To drastically oversimplify, if we think of a depression as a situation where people develop a self

Sunday Picnic

In Meridian Park here in DC. Bonus points if you can spot the wonky Joan of Arc statue.

The Devastating, Subversive Wit of George Eliot

I don't know that much about the historical context of Middlemarch , but I know it was published well before the women's rights revolution had got up much steam, and I reckon it's fair to say she had some revolutionary ideas swirling beneath all that glorious insight. Dig this little jab: Dorothea had gathered emotion as she went on, and had forgotten everything except the relief of pouring forth her feelings, unchecked: an experience once habitual with her, but hardly ever present since her marriage, which had been a perpetual struggle of energy with fear. For the moment, Will's admiration was accompanied with a chilling sense of remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes made sad oversights in carrying out her intention ; as in the case of good Mr. Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment in rather a st