Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,174 entries, all of them here in full.
July 2, 2009 · 146 words
Them!
A giant ant colony has taken over the world! The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What’s more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South
Read entry →July 2, 2009 · 72 words
Unique Opportunity
The writer Ian McDowell needs y’all’s help. His father, who has just lost a leg, needs to move out of his apartment, where the manager refuses to install modifications to aid the handicapped. (This is legal, apparently.)Ian is raising money by offering a unique item for sale on eBay, a one-of-a-kind hand-written collec
Read entry →July 1, 2009 · 560 words
Reviews Too Late: Legend of the Shadowless Sword
The lineage of this film is a little unusual: it’s a 2005 Korean production with Korean actors, the stunt team is from Hong Kong, the movie was filmed in China, and the screenwriter is someone named Paul Sheen, who has no other credits that I can find. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the result is […]
Read entry →June 30, 2009 · 442 words
Goldman Sucks
I admire a brilliant piece of invective as well as the next guy, and the best I’ve seen in a long time is Matt Taibi’s evisceration of Goldman Sachs, which he blames for both the creation, and the collapse, of every financial bubble of the last century. (Wow! Talk about evil!)The bank’s unprecedented reach and [&hellip
Read entry →June 30, 2009 · 75 words
Charlie, Dunked
Here is our cat Charlie shortly after the catastrophe. It looks like he got totally immersed in water, or had a bucket of water thrown over him, or maybe got sprayed with a hose. I don’t know exactly what happened, I wasn’t there. I only know that I came home and there he was, on […]
Read entry →June 29, 2009 · 710 words
Reviews Too Late: The Assassination of Jesse James
This may be one of a very few films ever to be doomed by excessive devotion to its literary source material. (Watchmen might be another.) The full title, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, isn’t the sort of name that Hollywood gives to its films: it’s taken from the the Ron […]
Read entry →June 29, 2009 · 140 words
Standing By
The Iranian revolution has entered a grim and secret phase. Grim, because the news is of mass arrests, protests being smashed, demonstrators beaten. Secret, because the situation may be resolved— or not— by maneuvers within the Iranian power structure that are opaque to those of us in the West. Still, the c
Read entry →June 27, 2009 · 127 words
Art Film
Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world… but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once [&he
Read entry →June 24, 2009 · 468 words
Hostage Facility
All the thinking I’ve been doing about Iran in the last week has brought to mind something that I always thought was kind of obvious, which is that Iran talks big and swaggers rather a lot for a country that has a built-in on-off switch. By which I mean Kharg Island. Kharg Island lies about […]
Read entry →June 24, 2009 · 592 words
Levy on Iran
Bernard-Henri Levy on Iran:Whatever happens from this point on, nothing will ever be the same in Tehran. Whatever happens, if the protest gains momentum or loses steam, if it ends up prevailing or if the regime succeeds in terrorizing it, he who should now only be called president-non-elect Ahmadinejad will only be an
Read entry →June 23, 2009 · 186 words
Another Long Day
Another long day trying to keep up with events in Iran. For those who wish to help Iranians and dissidents in other nations evade surveillance, check out the Tor Project. Originally a project of the U.S. Navy and now spun off into a freeware company, Tor— strangely sharing a name with the largest US science [&hel
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