Part 1. The ideal policy Basbøll, as always, gets right to the point: Andrew Gelman is not the plagiarism police because there is no such thing as the plagiarism police. But, he continues: There is, at any self-respecting university and any self-respecting academic journal, a plagiarism policy, and there sure as hell is a “morality” [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Literature category.
The strange reappearance of Matthew Klam
A few years ago I asked what happened to Matthew Klam, a talented writer who has a bizarrely professional-looking webpage but didn’t seem to be writing anymore. Good news! He published a new story in the New Yorker! Confusingly, he wrote it under the name “Justin Taylor,” but I’m not fooled (any more than I [...]
Speaking frankly
Even within the realm of writing-about-statistics, there are things I can say in a blog that are much more difficult to include in an academic article. Blogging gives me freedom. But I want to distinguish between two different sorts of frankness. 1. Obnoxiousness: In a blog I can write, “I hate X” as rudely as [...]
“Joseph Anton”
I only read the review, not the book. What puzzled me was not any lack of self-awareness but rather this bit: The title of Mr. Rushdie’s new memoir . . . comes from the alias he assumed when British police told him back in 1989 that he needed a pseudonym: the Joseph comes from Joseph [...]
Scalability in education
This blog is an exercise in scalability. Instead of sending a long email to one person, I put the email in a blog where thousands can read it. Instead of devoting three hours to a referee report that will only be read by two people (the author and the journal editor), I do the equivalent [...]
Sides and Vavreck on the 2012 election
Political scientists John Sides (one of my cobloggers at the sister spot) and Lynn Vavreck are writing a book on the 2012 election. I’ve seen what John has posted on this so far and it looks very reasonable to me. The paradox is that “reasonable” and “scholarly” are not as exciting as “soap opera.” Nonetheless, [...]
Watching the sharks jump
Recently in the sister blog: Niall Ferguson is a hack. Niall Ferguson is not always a hack, sometimes he just makes silly mistakes. Paul Krugman is not a hack, but he sometimes he goes over the top. Reflections on hacks. P.S. Yes, technically I’m misusing the expression, it should really be something like, “Watching the [...]
Two exciting movie ideas: “Second Chance U” and “The New Dirty Dozen”
I have a great idea for a movie. Actually two movies based on two variants of a similar idea. It all started when I saw this story: Dr. Anil Potti, the controversial cancer researcher whose work at Duke University led to lawsuits from patients, is now a medical oncologist at the Cancer Center of North [...]
The pinch-hitter syndrome again
Here. (Background here.) P.S. Just a thought: is it possible that one reason for the effectiveness of relief pitchers is that, by the end of the game, the starting players (that is, the hitters who have been playing all game) are getting tired? I’m pretty sure that lots of baseball-statistics experts will know the answer [...]
Donald E. Westlake on George W. Bush
A post-WTC time capsule.
It is difficult to convey intonation in typed speech
I just wanted to add the above comment to Bob’s notes on language. Spoken (and, to some extent, handwritten) language can be much more expressive than the typed version. I’m not just talking about slang or words such as baaaaad; I’m also talking about pauses that give logical structure to a sentence. For example, sentences [...]
Retro ethnic slurs
From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t [...]
Quotes from me!
When linking to my review of Duncan Watts’s book in a recent post, I came across some fun bits that I’d like to share (for those of you who didn’t just click through and read the whole thing): On business books: I’m not so interested in the business angle but I suppose that’s how you [...]
“And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well”
In our recent discussion of plagiarism and fake quotes, a commenter points to two recent posts by Mark Liberman (here and here) where Liberman links to about a zillion cases of journalists publishing quotes that were never said. He goes into some detail about two journalists from the New Yorker: Jared Diamond, who created quotes [...]
“Get off my lawn”-blogging
Jay Livingston critiques the recent pronouncements of sociologist and cigarette shill Peter Berger, who recently has moved into cultural criticism of New York’s mayor for living with “a woman to whom he is not married” (this is apparently a European sort of thing, I guess they don’t have unmarried partners in the parts of the [...]
Defining ourselves arbitrarily
Robin Hanson writes that he does’t use slang: I [Hanson] am not into slang. I want to talk to the widest possible audience, and to focus on timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics. I can see why people want to signal loyalty to their groups, especially in the military, but [...]
The Art of Fielding
I liked it; the reviews were well-deserved. It indeed is a cross between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. What struck me most, though, was the contrast with Indecision, the novel by Harbach’s associate, Benjamin Kunkel. As I noted a few years ago, Indecision was notable in that [...]
Coaching, teaching, and writing
I sent the following email to Thomas Basbøll: I read this: http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/p/writing-coach.html and was reminded of this: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/10/could-i-use-a-statistics-coach/ He replied: Which reminds me of this http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2011/10/teacher-or-coach.html We seem to be approaching some sort of Platonic ideal in which we can conduct an entire conversation from links to our previous writings. Just like that joke about [...]
“I didn’t marry a horn, I married a man”
This (from an article by Alec Wilkinson) is amazing: Did Louis Armstrong and his wife really have this conversation? This is just too much!
A Ph.D. thesis is not really a marathon
Thomas Basbøll writes: A blog called The Thesis Whisperer was recently pointed out to me. I [Basbøll] haven’t looked at it closely, but I’ll be reading it regularly for a while before I recommend it. I’m sure it’s a good place to go to discover that you’re not alone, especially when you’re struggling with your [...]
Advice on writing research articles
From a few years ago: Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these [...]
Battle of the Repo Man quotes: Reid Hastie’s turn
In response to my comments on his recent opinion article on the the human tendency to overvalue information presented as stories, Reid Hastie writes: Andrew (and Commenters) … I’d like to try to clarify some of the statements and implications in my Bloomberg article on “Our Gift for Good Stories …” The essay is what [...]
I hate to get all Gerd Gigerenzer on you here, but . . .
Jonathan Cantor points me to an opinion piece by psychologist Reid Hastie, “Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth.” I have mixed feelings about Hastie’s article. On one hand I do think his point is important. It’s not new to me, but presumably it’s new to many readers of bloomberg.com. I like [...]
Stolen jokes
Fun stories here (from Kliph Nesteroff, link from Mark Palko).
Lists of Note and Letters of Note
These (from Shaun Usher) are surprisingly good, especially since he appears to come up with new lists and letters pretty regularly. I suppose a lot of them get sent in from readers, but still. Here’s my favorite recent item, a letter sent to the Seattle Bureau of Prohibition in 1931: Dear Sir: My husband is [...]