Two Wisconsin inmates got into a jailhouse brawl over Woody Allen and his relationship with Soon-Yi: [T]he fight began about 5:30 p.m. July 9 during mealtime when James F. Lala, 31, of Grafton asked fellow inmate Corey T. Wilson, 36, of Menomonee Falls what he thought of Allen’s marriage in 1997 to Sun Yi [sic] [...]
One of Mitt Romney’s national finance co-chairs, Mel Sembler, was the founder of a drug/alcohol-recovery “boot camp” for teens called Straight Inc., where teens were “subjected to unusual punishment, infliction of pain, humiliation, intimidation, ridicule, coercion, threats, mental abuse… and interference with daily living functions such as eating, sleeping and toileting,” according to the LA [...]
I was disappointed, overall, with DeLillo’s Falling Man. I think Andrew O’Hagan nailed it in his NYRB review: DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, [...]
A few weeks ago, I posted a link to an excerpt from Peeling the Onion, the newly-translated memoir of Günter Grass. There’s a review of Peeling the Onion in the NYRB. When interviewers have pressed him on this issue [i.e. his Waffen-SS past], the answers have been vague and unsatisfactory. “It oppressed me,” he told [...]
Did you ever think to yourself, “Gee, I wonder who has the longest hair of any Russian man?” Well, your curiosity can now be satisfied, thanks to English Russia.
The game of checkers (aka “English draughts”) has been solved. A computer program called Chinook is literally unbeatable. The team directed Chinook so it didn’t have to go through every one of the 500 billion billion (5 * 10 ^ 20) possible moves. Not all losing plays needed to be analysed; instead, for each game [...]
In case you missed it last week, readers, I want you to head over to Appletree and watch the amazing four-part video of a trial lawyer, drunk in court, trying his best to talk his way out of all the trouble he’s gotten himself into. The lawyer tried to blame the fact that he was [...]
A new feature, readers — the Daily Link. I really enjoyed “How I Spent the War” by Günter Grass. It appeared in the New Yorker several weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to link to it here ever since. Günter Grass, 1999 Nobel laureate (for Literature), shocked Germany and the rest of the world when [...]
