Attention Flow

Sunrise over New York City as seen from the West Side In Alexandra Horowitz‘s new book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, she explores the blocks around her home in New York City in the company of people with a particular expertise—an artist, a geologist, a self-professed “type nerd”, a field naturalist/insect advocate (among […]

Output/Yield Ratios

Crooked timber and all that jazz Kingsley Amis, from his review of Don DeLillo‘s latest book in the New Yorker: When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less…I […]

Eyjafjallajökull the Magnificent

Black rivers of meltwater mixed with volcanic ash, spreading from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, Icelandic Coast Guard) A seven-mile-high (11-kilometer-high) cloud of steam, smoke, and ash billows from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Thursday (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, Icelandic Coast Guard) Steam explodes from a glacier-topped Iceland volcano (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, […]