I just want to get this on the record now, before it’s conventional wisdom: At the end of the most recent Harry Potter book, one mystery left unresolved is the identity of a certain “R.A.B.” who (so as not to spoil the ending) let’s just say appears to have betrayed Lord Voldemort in a pretty […]

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When a use of language is described as “Orwellian,” usually the speaker means that obfuscatory or euphemistic terms are deliberately being used for political purposes to hoodwink listeners. But Orwell was also always concerned with the corrosive effects of merely sloppy language. A case in point is the ambiguity in the terms public and private. […]

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It had actually slipped my mind that I’d ordered this, so I was delighted today to get my copy of the very large, very handsome, lavishly illustrated re-issue of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Curse of Lono, signed by both Thompson and artist Ralph Steadman. This now goes into head-to-head competition with the autographed copy of […]

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Rumor has it that Dumbledore bites it in the next Harry Potter book. That would’ve been my guess for purely plot-based reasons. Thing is, Dumbledore’s a sort of perpetual deus ex machina: They’ve established he can kick Voldemort’s ass, so he’s got to be implausibly called away or unavailable whenever they want actual tension in […]

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Ex-roomie Greg Newburn passes me the talking-stick on the question: “What 5 books are you vaguely embarassed to admit you haven’t read?” over at the new group blog Liberteaser. Off the top of my head: Law’s Empire by Ronald Dworkin: This one’s not so embarassing in itself, except that in the circles I move in, […]

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It’s not terribly often that popular music lyrics hit me with a word I wasn’t familiar with, but that’s Mike Doughty for you. First track off his new album contains this verse: Aimless days, uncool ways of decathecting Painless phase, blacked out thoughts you be rejecting Yep, I had to look up decathecting, which apparently […]

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You can now get The Sorrows of Young Werther as they doubtless would’ve meant to be read if Goethe had broadband: in daily e-mails.

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The artsy publisher Taschen is apparently issuing a new edition of the long-out-of-print Hunter S. Thompson book Curse of Lono. It’s a hefty 300 beans, but it’s a big illustrated hardcover in a limited edition of 1000 copies, each signed by both Thompson and artist Ralph Steadman. I’m a sufficiently hardcore Thompsonite that I sucked […]

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I was chuckling along at this brutal review of (from the sound of it) a thoroughly awful erotica author who’s apparently being condescendingly toasted for being a black female author who makes it to the bestseller lists “without any help from Oprah.” But I got an extra special kick, in this context, out of what […]

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Flipping through the new Atlantic Monthly, I spot an ad for an index-fund stock called Spider. The headline promises “the enormity of the S&P 500 in one little share.” Yeah, yeah, I know it’s become synonymous with “large size,” but I still got a chuckle out of it.

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