Newmark's Door

"Seeing Catch-22 Twice"

Ron Rosenbaum interprets Catch-22 in a way I haven't seen before.

"A Lifetime of Sowell-Full Thought"

I agree with the reviewer: "Buy yourself and everyone you know an early Christmas present."

"Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World"

Pre-publication draft of a book published last near by Cambridge Univ. Press. Free.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

The book is based on an inter-disciplinary course entitled Networks that we teach at Cornell. The book, like the course, is designed at the introductory undergraduate level with no formal prerequisites. To support deeper explorations, most of the chapters are supplemented with optional advanced sections.

"Can You Guess The Most Well-Read City In America?"

#1 is as you'd expect. But when you combine #2--Alexandria VA--and #10--Arlington VA--and #14--D.C.--it's pretty impressive.

(This is according to Amazon sales.)

"Teach yourself willpower"

Summary of a new book, Willpower: Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength.

See also "3 Surprising Facts About Self-Control" by Heidi Grant Halvorson, motivational psychologist:

So the first thing you are going to want to do, if you are serious about resisting temptation, is make peace with the fact that your willpower is limited.  If you’ve spent all your self-control handling stresses at work, you will not have much left at the end of the day for sticking to your resolutions.  Think about when you are most likely to feel drained and vulnerable, and make a plan to keep yourself out of harm’s way.  Be prepared with an alternate activity or a low-calorie snack, whichever applies.

Also, don’t try to pursue two goals at once that each require a lot of self-control if you can help it.  This is really just asking for trouble. For example, studies show that people who try to quit smoking whiledieting, in order to avoid the temporary weight gain that often accompanies smoking cessation, are more likely to fail at bothenterprises than people who tackle them one at a time.

"How Do You Learn to Edit Yourself?"

In the Chronicle of Higher Education last September, Rachel Toor gives some fine advice.

She mentions four books that will help: The Elements of Style, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, Economical Writing, and On Writing. I've read 'em all, and like--a lot--all four. Pressed to choose just one, I'd go with Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. I wish I'd read it thirty years ago.

(A reader of the Door has strongly recommended The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader's Perspective. It's on my to-be-read pile and I hope to get to it "real soon now".)

"Sounds familiar"

Review of The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture.

We think of our use of language as 'fluency'. There are, however, congealed lumps floating in it and, if we look beneath the surface, often more lumps than liquidity. Put another way, most language is pre-owned. The previous owners are, as Gary Morson instructs us, often worth knowing about. Take, for example (not one of Morson's examples), the indisputably most famous and quoted line in English literature, 'To be, or not to be, that is the question'.

Most theatregoers would think the sentence spit new. But should they also go to a performance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus they would hear the following in the hero's magnificent opening soliloquy, in which he resolves to sell his soul: 'Bid Oncaymæon farewell, Galen come'. The Greek Oncaymæon transliterates as 'being and not being'. Where is Faustus a professor of philosophy? The University of Wittenberg. Where is Hamlet a student of philosophy? The University of - you guessed it. 'To be or not to be' is not a deeply original thought but a hackneyed sophomoric seminar topic. Hamlet is not thinking, he's quoting.

Good question

It's Google's world; we just live in it.

Google isn’t invincible. Eric Schmidt likes to say that its competitors are only one click away: if you don’t like Google’s search results, or its business practices, you can always use Bing. But Google is currently facing anti-trust scrutiny by Senate subcommittees, and the bigger it gets the less answerable the regulatory threat will become. Google is getting cleverer precisely because it is so big. If it’s cut down to size then what will happen to everything it knows? That’s the conundrum. It’s clearly wrong for all the information in all the world’s books to be in the sole possession of a single company. It’s clearly not ideal that only one company in the world can, with increasing accuracy, translate text between 506 different pairs of languages. On the other hand, if Google doesn’t do these things, who will?

"Searching For The Imdb Of Books"

Blogger argues we currently don't have the equivalent of imdb.com for books and that we need it.

"Amazon’s Kindle Gets a Library Card"

You can now check out e-books from your local library and download them to your Kindle.

Pretty cool.