The Deadly Necklace. The current issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating story about
Richard Lancelyn Green, a preeminent Arthur Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes
scholar who
died under mysterious circumstances in March. At the time of his death, Green had been looking into the provinence of an
archive of
Conan Doyle’s papers [reprint of a NYTimes article], which he believed
(perhaps wrongly) had been stolen, and he'd hinted that there had been threats to his life. Soon afterward, he was found garroted by a shoelace in his room. The magazine does not provide the article online, but does offer this
Q&A with the author. I cannot recommend it highly enough, but to get you started while you're still at work, here's some more about Green's death from a Holmes
message board; a discussion of the
curse of Conan Doyle, which holds that Holmes scholars can meet an untimely end; and info on Doyle's
belief in the
supernatural.
posted by owenville
on Dec 9, 2004 -
13 comments
Is Alex Ross Trying Too Hard To Be Eclectic? It's a great article but, imho, a few false notes are struck here and there. Can you love classical and popular music at the same time? Classical types always like the same popular stuff (Dylan and Pink Floyd, of course) and popular types always like the same classical stuff (Wagner, Puccini, Mahler) but somehow the suspicion remains that one's heart can't be in two places at once. There's something ingratiating and icky about attempts to pretend "it's all music". It isn't, is it? Also, God forgive me, 20 is
way too late to start listening to Pop.
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Feb 20, 2004 -
50 comments
"Listening Post," on now at the Whitney Museum, gathers conversational snippets from thousands of chat rooms and bulletin boards, structures them according to word counts, common phrases and other criteria and then displays them on a grid of more than 200 small rectangular electronic screens. Last week's New Yorker admired the resulting "found poems": "Duct tape and plastic for the White House duct tape, and water in the bathtub, eheh hmmm...."
posted by capiscum
on Mar 11, 2003 -
3 comments
The "merger" of the Egyptian Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad and the Saudi Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda in 2001, based on the foundation of Qutb's book "Milestones", provide outlet for those who have no other way of expressing their objections to the authoritarian regimes of the countries they live in, and the reach of American power in the Middle East.
posted by semmi
on Sep 17, 2002 -
19 comments
"Absence is the most natural of phenomena, in that every presence begets an absence. It's just the way things work. Yet absence is at the root of all of the hardest things we have to face deaths, breakups, any kind of separation."
posted by semmi
on Sep 8, 2002 -
5 comments
"
Babe Ruth and I were teammates on the Yankees—and lovers, too. It was no big deal back then. After Sunday games were over, lots of players and writers would come by our little flat in the Morrisania section of the Bronx for one of Babe's famous bean dinners. I also remember the evening when Babe, wearing his familiar pink housecoat, turned out a nice catfish stew for Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Everyone in baseball knew how it was with me and Babe. After the company had gone home and we'd done the dishes, he would lie in my arms and I'd whisper, 'You are my bambino.'"
posted by semmi
on Jun 30, 2002 -
9 comments
"When a male polar bear and a human are face to face, there occurs a brief kind of magic: an intense, visceral connection between man and beast whose poignancy and import cannot be expressed in mere words.
Then he rips your arms off."
It's rare for someone to pull off morbid and hilarious at the same time. Here's an example.
posted by Su
on May 16, 2002 -
22 comments
"The title of my talk tonight is How to Conquer Stupidity, which is actually a pretty stupid thing to attempt. For me, anyway. One, it's not possible. Two, maybe it's not even desirable. That's probably the premise of all of my work, that I embrace my stupidity wholeheartedly and celebrate it, as often as I can."
And you can too,
here.
posted by semmi
on May 9, 2002 -
6 comments
The Next World Order. A fascinating article suggesting that the new guiding principle of American foreign policy, originally formulated by Cheney and Wolfowitz during the first Bush administration, is the prevention of the rise of any other great power which could rival the U.S.
posted by homunculus
on Mar 27, 2002 -
10 comments
The most sensible take I've seen on Enron and Bush.
Once all the fuss has died down—Congress is currently planning ten separate inquiries—two good things will probably have come out of the Enron mess. Companies will no longer be allowed to use their pension programs to treat their employees as an especially loyal and malleable class of shareholder; instead, pension funds will have to be diversified. And accounting firms will no longer be allowed to act as paid consultants to the companies they audit, as Arthur Andersen did with Enron. New Yorker link, no registration required.
posted by jfuller
on Jan 23, 2002 -
9 comments
Nick Hornby reviews the Billboard Top Ten. Quote:
We have been told often enough that to disapprove of gangsta rap is pointless, middle class, and smug, like disapproving of modern urban life itself. Nevertheless, one is entitled to feel queasy about the enthusiasm for and endorsement of the gangsta life audible on "The Saga Continues . . ."
posted by acridrabbit
on Aug 21, 2001 -
19 comments
Jason put up a link to the
New Yorker article that mentions himself, Meg, Pyra, EV, etc. It also mentions MetaFilter and myself. I find this funny in a way, all of of these people that never would have known anything about each other are all interconnected. Why? Because Ev and Meg started Pyra. Because I read an article about the original Pyra app. Which led me to Blogger. Which led to Ev, Meg, Pb, MetaFilter... whcih led to Kottke, Haughey, etc. Ahhh the good old days
posted by monkeyboy
on Nov 21, 2000 -
36 comments
