Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker has a neat piece on the challenge of blogging and other new media to traditional journalism called "Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists." One of the most interesting bits compares the rise of blogs to the growth of pamphleteering and periodicals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Based on research collected in the book Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain Partisanship and Political Culture by Mark Knights, Lemann notes that it was the combination of a relaxation of government restrictions on publishing, the rise in the availability of the printing press, and the growing urbanization of the populace in England led to a dramatic increase in the volume and impact of pamphlets and self-published periodicals.
Continue reading "Pamphlets: the Blogs of the 17th Century" »

I was digging around the archives of my computer and came across a bunch of poetry I wrote in the 1990s. Some of it is cringe-inducingly bad. Several have not aged well, particularly my "cyber" series. But 

We had a little scare with my cat Mole Negro, who has been having problems with his right eye. Ocassionally his eye clouds up and he gets some milky discharge that in the past has cleared up after a day or so. My roommate Paul alerted me that the day before yesterday Mole's eye had totally closed up. I worried that maybe Mole was losing vision in one eye.

The
As I was posting 



