LATEST ADDITIONS

Bagheera opines that you just can't beat the "cute kitty" school of art.

In 2005, journalism professor Michael Skube wrote an uninformed "think" piece about blogs and blog culture, concluding that bloggers didn't do "real" journalism. (He's probably seen this one.) On August 19 this year, he did what hacks do&mdash;he wrote the same piece again, this time for <I>The LA Times</I>.

I don't disagree with the need for contemplative silence, but I find our contemprary society particularly ill-suited to it. Perhaps iPods are the cure to noise pollution rather than the problem itself.

Suhas Sreedhar writes about CD over-compression in <I>IEEE Spectrum</I>. It's a good 'un that goes beyond the usual hand-wringing to the real danger it poses.

I have a <I>Slate</I> <A HREF="http://www.slate.com/id/2172543/">column</A&gt; today, an appreciation of Max Roach, who died last week at age 83. (Sometimes my editors let me break away from war and peace, though I have one of those <A HREF="http://www.slate.com/id/2172634">columns</A&gt; today, too.) The headline writer has me calling Roach the “greatest drummer” in jazz. I think Billy Higgins was probably better, but I didn’t make a fuss. In any case, all great jazz drummers who came up after the mid-1940s, Higgins included, leaned or built on Max Roach’s innovations. Listen to the sound-clips that I link to in the column, and be sure to watch the YouTube clip toward the end. If you didn’t know before, you’ll see and hear what we’re all now missing.

I've written before about the Crippen & Landru publication of <I>The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, Including Newly Discovered Case Notes</I>, edited by Tom Nolan, which has a cover by my buddy <A HREF="http://www.jeffwong.com/caricature.htm">Jeff Wong</A>, who also happens to be an internationally acknowledged expert on Macdonald.

Nick Hornby gets an unusual request.