Jay Fitzgerald blogs a great new addition to the dictionary: “Introducing a new word (and not just a nickname) into the local vocabulary: ‘big-dig’ (v. — to swindle money from feds, to shamelessly loot, to hoodwink non-Massachusetts residents into paying for local boondoggles — big-digging, big-digged — We sure big-digged them again — / …… Continue reading

Gregg Easterbrook in the December issue of Wired: In 1965, another sort of big bang echo—the cosmic background radiation—was discovered. Soon, it was assumed, cosmologists would be able to say, “Here’s how everything happened, steps one, two, and three.” Today cosmologists do think they know a fair amount about steps two and three—what the incipient… Continue reading

Scottish crime novelist Val McDermid on how the mystery and crime genres (at least in the UK) are helping to keep ‘mainstream’ fiction honest: “Literary fiction in the U.K. became very concerned with literary theory, critical theory, to the extent that the notion of narrative almost became a dirty word. That’s slowly started to change… Continue reading

William Safire on the importance of Israel’s upcoming election: So I’m rooting for Arik to win his party’s nomination this week and for Likud to win seats from Labor and from Shas, the fading religious party, in January. Then I’d like to see Bibi take the finance ministry and be given a free hand to… Continue reading

My book Digital Movies With QuickTime Pro has been listed in the Author’s Corner section of this week’s QuickTime newsletter from Apple.