Very frustrating review of Pinker’s Blank Slate by Louis Menand in the New Yorker this week. Menand’s as smart as they come, and his dismantling of Pinker’s theory of modern art is dead-on. But he’s much slipperier on the tougher political questions, and way too easy on the academic…

I think this is one of the most interesting things to come out of the Office group in a long while: Microsoft OneNote, announced yesterday at Comdex. Here’s the elevator pitch: “OneNote combines the freedom and flexibility of paper notes with the efficiency and power of digital…

As a lapsed semiotics major, I still follow the world of lit theory superstars, though somewhat from afar, a little like the way I follow the world of Meg Ryan and J Lo in US Weekly. So this interview with Jacques Derrida landed squarely in my…

Jason Kottke posts about the virtues of short blocks, which he’s noticing with fresh eyes now that he’s relocated to the West Village. (Welcome, Jason!) Jane Jacobs talks about this in Death and Life: why the tighter, short-block grid is preferable to the looser grid with long…

Thanks to Gene at Atomiq for suggesting a better monicker for my Google idea. (Apparently “lexical penetration” was a little too raunchy-sounding.) So I hereby declare that “googleshare” is the official term. Recommended usages as follows:

Just noticed that Time named the still-in-beta virtual world, Second Life, one of its Best Inventions 2002. I’m curious if anyone reading has had a chance to check it out already?