Follow BeltwayBlips on Twitter
Crooked Timber Latest Blog Posts |
Add as Favorite
Claim Blog 
|
http://crookedtimber.org/ - Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made
Click on the "vote it up" button to submit a story below to our homepage.
If you're the owner of Crooked Timber, claim your blog to unlock additional tools and reports.
This post is going to have it all: comics, fonts, broadbrush high-lowbrow cultural opinionation, curiously reasonably priced British TV.
We’ll start with fonts. Why did the modernists go ga-ga for sans serif? Take Tschichold, my recent subject of study . Early in his career, he ...
World
Ten types of commenter, of which the last are the rarest.
The commenter who has not read the post properly, decides they know what it says anyway, and fires off a series of disgusted observations.
Commenter who applies the most uncharitable possible interpretation to the post, and ...
Other
Huffington Post
I’m finally collecting my thoughts in response to Chris’ post on Consequentialism and Communism , particularly this remark imputing to consequentialists in general the very same disregard for, or scepticism about, the rights of individuals, the same willingness to sacrifice ...
Other
So as Ingrid notes , EU member states have chosen Von Rompuy as the new President of the European Council. To use the terms that Euro-politicians have themselves been using (which were nicked, presumably by Brian Cowen, from the title of a political science text on Irish Taoisigh), they have ...
Congress
To judge by an Associated Press report, the field of Oprah Studies will soon become a historical discipline:
I’ve now spent more time reading the literature than I ever have watching the show. Some of it has been very instructive. There was, for example, a journal article from a few ...
Other
Oprah Winfrey
crookedtimber.org - 2 days ago
—
crookedtimber.org —
So the news is spreading that the Belgian
PM, Herman Van Rompuy, would be the first president
of the EU. I am not going to comment on what that means for the EU now. It’s after nine in the evening here, and I’m preparing my teaching for ...
(more)
Whether or not it is good for Europe, it is very bad for ...
Comments
vote down
Matthew Yglesias
found this 2 days agofound this
It’s been slow going, but I’ve finally finished the draft chapter of my book-in-progress that looks forward to a new research program for macroeconomics, an absurdly ambitious task, but one that needs to be tackled. Of course, what I’ve written isn’t fundamentally new ...
Congress
I just listened to an EconTalk podcast interview with Richard Posner about his new book, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ‘08 and the Descent into Depression [amazon]. The book has gotten a bit of buzz for the way in which Posner semi-recants certain libertarian or Chicago-style ...
World
I’m not sure what Sarah Palin’s favorite work of postmodern theory might be (all of them, probably) but she seems to take her lead from Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction. Other political figures use the media as part of what JB calls “production.” That is, they generate ...
White House
Sarah Palin
Scott Murphy
[self-promotion]My first book is out from Cambridge (and has been for a few weeks). Entitled The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany , it sets out a rational choice account of how institutions affect the ways in which people do ...
World
Italy
Germany
Even Kevin Drum is getting into the game, reading this NY Times piece about type purists . Following up his comment about how bemused he is that font enthusiasts bother to get bothered about anachronistic signage in films an on TV, may I recommend these pages from one of the folks quoted in ...
World
Huffington Post
I saw Michael Haneke’s new film, The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) last night. A beautiful and disturbing evocation of childhood and evil in a small German village on the eve of World War 1. It really cements Haneke’s reputation as one of the greatest film-makers working today. ...
Congress
My friend Josh Glenn, and his collaborator Rob Walker, have been running an interesting project: Significant Objects . I’ll quote from the project info page:
THE IDEA
A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the ...
White House
For the next several hours Amazon has all four of the Eccleston/Tennant Doctor Who seasons for sale at a reasonable price; that is, 60% off the usual, quite absurd price. Last year my brother-in-law bought me the first series for X-Mas and I enjoyed it. But I’ve been unwilling to shell ...
Other
I wrote a couple of blog posts last year on the Mickey Tax, or, as its promoters would prefer to describe it, the ‘Travel Promotion Act’ bill, which would seek to ‘promote’ travel to the US by imposing a fee on anyone entering the country which would in turn be handed ...
Other
Gotta change things up, keep things fresh. This video is fantastic and highly educational. It teaches you how to whittle your own 19th Century dictionary, using only string, a turnip, and a clamp. But first you have to make your own Linotype machine. It’s much easier to go here and just ...
Other
Huffington Post
Robin Kinross – who knows more about Tschichold than I – showed up in comments to my Tschichold post to object that the book I said was pretty good is actually a shameful mess. Kinross wrote the introduction to Tschichold’s The New Typography [amazon]. It’s the first ...
Other
crookedtimber.org - 11 days ago
—
crookedtimber.org —
91 years ago, the world marked the end
of the Great War that had consumed tens of
millions of lives, mostly those of young men sent to die far from home in a cause that few could explain, then or now. It was a false dawn. The chaos unleashed by the ...
(more)
Armistice Day
crookedtimber.org - 6 days ago
—
crookedtimber.org —
Paul Krugman links to an excellent take-down by
Elizabeth Kolbert of the notorious climate change chapter in
Superfreakonomics. what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” isn’t the authors’ many blunders; ...
(more)
Chicken Little
But I’m never going to read a long post on typography and philosophy, you object. There’s life! The whole world awaits me! Well, alright. Just look at this , then.
