Birds Don't Fly Fair
They bend the rules.
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An Abridged Dictionary
Don't pick up that dictionary! You're smart enough to figure out what that new word means.
A Beat Memoir Before the Beats
Jack London's forgotten <I>The Road</I>.
Unraveling the Möbius Strip
Eugene Starostin and Gert van der Heijde have solved a 75-year-old conundrum by developing tools to predict the three dimensional form a Möbius strip will take.
Submarine Cable Map 2007
'Fess up, you didn't know where they are either.
Jason Moran: The Rauschenberg of Jazz
Jason Moran finished a week at the Jazz Standard in New York City last night and confirmed his standing, at age 32, as <I>the</I> jazz pianist of our times. A few years ago, I saw Moran playing in duet at Merkin Hall with Andrew Hill, one of his mentors, more than twice his age. Afterward, a friend of mine, a trumpeter just a little older than Moran, made a sharp observation about their respective generations: Hill, a leading avant-gardist from the ‘60s then undergoing a renaissance, played in one style, his style; Moran played in many styles, all styles. Though he didn’t put it in these terms, Hill (who recently died of cancer) was the jazz equivalent of an abstract expressionist painter (say, Franz Kline or Robert Motherwell), while Moran is the supreme post-modernist (say, Robert Rauschenberg) who appropriates everything around him, including ready-made objects, and somehow makes it all his own.
Harry Potter and the Death of Reading
Personally, I've enjoyed the Potter books finding the themes more archetypal than "derivative," but <I>chacun á son goût</I>, ya know? What I found interesting about Ron Charles' rant was this pithy argument: "We're experiencing the literary equivalent of a loss of biodiversity." In 1994, according to a Stanford survey, over 70% of fiction sales were from just five authors.
Freedom Isn't Just Another Word
John Flahive answered the phone one evening. On the other end of the line was a stranger, George Martorano calling from prison. That call changed both their lives.
Did you convert your system to multichannel audio? Has it stuck with you? Why or why not?
During the SACD and DVD-Audio heyday, multichannel audio was finding new converts. Did you convert? Has it stuck with you? Why or why not?
Focal Electra 1037 Be loudspeaker
With the introduction of the 1000 Be series in 2005, Focal slipped its exclusive, high-performance beryllium tweeter out of the stuffy-looking Utopia series and into a sleeker, more stylish, more modern form.