Happy birthday, Deb A.! This is really late, but I am/have been at the cottage with my awesome extended family, so I win anyhow. Ha ha ha!
I never thought I’d say this, but I actually enjoyed the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows better than the second. I didn’t think I’d say that because pretty much nothing happens during the former, and pretty much everything happens during the latter. Even more surprising, although…
Alternate title: a pretend essay on Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010) . “Pretend” because if a student handed in something like this to me and called it an “essay,” I would probably send it back, but this is a blog, so…
So… I still haven’t gone back to watching House, and after hearing about the season finale, all I can say is, whew, glad I got out when I did. Here is what I’ve been reading and watching instead.
Yes, more micro reviews. Originally, I meant to have an election-related blog for this weekend, but I didn’t finish it in time. Whatever, you wouldn’t want me to attempt think-y blog entries if I didn’t feed my brain with all this stuff.
As some of you may know, I recently returned from a month-long research trip to Europe. What you may not know is that I decided to travel as light as possible. In practical terms, this means the unthinkable: no books*! For someone who used to travel with no fewer than…
Or, Micro-Reviews, non-fiction edition. Whenever I go home for the holidays, there are invariably three things waiting for me in my room: the mail that has gathered in the interim, all the Globe and Mail Saturday cryptic crosswords accumulated in my absence (carefully torn out and folded by my father),…
But first! I’m headed away for research for the next few weeks, so my blog posts may be sporadic. And some may be full of photos. End transmission. Although those of you who’ve read my other reviews (micro, macro, and in between) might wonder at it, I feel like I…
One of the reasons C. S. Lewis is such a delightful writer is that he’s good at making insightful studies of a topic often treated with saccharinity or cynicism: how people think and behave when they’re trying to be good. He paints excellent portraits of intelligent minds trying to come…
If you can tell me the actual works of fiction in which all of these appear, you win the Internet! No Google! This is old news, but apart from the seven books of the Harry Potter series, one can buy J. K. Rowling’s versions of certain among Harry’s textbooks and…