Month: November 2013

  • The 50 Best Album Opening Lines

    I haven’t written much about music because I haven’t been listening to much but the same old stuff I’ve listened to for years. Case in point, today I was listening to Nirvana’s In Utero (1993; can you believe it’s been twenty years?!). The satisfying dissonance of the opening chord of “Serve the Servants” kicked in, […]

  • Automation automaton

    I’ve been thinking today about automation. Most people I know do not put much effort into automating tasks, even those that are rote, tedious, and time-consuming, because of an implicit but untested assumption that the work involved in automating a task would outweigh any time savings. I seem to have the opposite problem, in that […]

  • The Turtle Diary

    Last week I read Russell Hoban’s The Turtle Diary (1975) which I quite liked. It’s an understated study of loneliness and a search for meaning in London in the 1970s, and many of its concerns remain of unwelcome relevance to today’s Londoners, however drastically the city has changed in the past four decades. The novel’s […]