A reading of many Greater Boston newspapers as well as listening to some of the commentary on radio talk shows leave little doubt that the media is building a campaign to force embattled UMass President William M. Bulger to resign his post as head of the Commonwealth’s sprawling system of higher education. The cozy relationship… Continue reading
My first official book review of the QuickTime book, by digital media veteran Clifford VanMeter.
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