Archive for January, 2007
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
Weekly reading
Jeffrey Toobin has an article on Google Book Search in the New Yorker.
The Chicago Fire made an attempt to sign Zinédine Zidane only to be told, like other MLS clubs, that the French midfielder is not coming out of retirement.
Wired has a short feature on Zidane: Un Portraît du 21ème Siècle, which was recently shown [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General, Technology by Rick
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
Is Nintendo stealing Sony’s gamers?
Sony’s quarterly profits dropped 5% compared to one year ago, while Nintendo’s shot up by 40%. A simple case of the Wii outselling the PS3, or is it? An article in today’s New York Times asks, “So is the Wii expanding the video game market, or is it stealing customers from Sony and Microsoft?” Unfortunately, [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in General by Rick
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
Piper Jaffray on Apple’s iPhone
I’ve been planning a post on Apple’s iPhone for a while now, and I still plan to write something, but until then, check out Piper Jaffray’s evaluation of the iPhone.
Cingular benefits from the added subscribers and press surrounding the device, while Apple benefits from the largest U.S. carrier as an initial market for the device. [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General, Technology by Rick
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
Little Asia on the hill
I went to Berkeley for a year and a half, so Timothy Egan’s Sunday’s NY Times Education Life cover story about the increased population of Asians on campus in the post-affirmative action was a must read. I thought I would have a much stronger reaction to it than I did. When I was a freshman [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in General by Rick
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
Monday’s mayhem
Joan Acocella reviews the new Martin Amis novel, House of Meetings, in the New Yorker this week. Michiko Kakutani also calls the book, “a powerful, unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General by Rick
Sunday, January 7th, 2007
Bill Gates and his dark cloud
The LA Times published a story today about the contradiction between the philanthropic aims of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the foundation’s investments in companies whose practices run counter to those aims. It looks like the Times is, once again, being a bit too provocative in an attention grab, but, well, that’s what [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General by Rick
Saturday, January 6th, 2007
Gladwell and Gopnik in the New Yorker
Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik both have articles in this week’s New Yorker. Gopnik’s, which is, in part, about the increasing distance that football fans feel from player, closes with a meditation on being a sports fan. He cites a book Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, titled In Praise of Athletic Beauty, in which Ulrich claims that [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General by Rick
Monday, January 1st, 2007
Big-Box Swindle: a diatribe against chain stores
Stacy Mitchell’s book, Big-Box Swindle, opens with an anecdote about the resurrection of Kepler’s in the fall of 2005, and in which this blog played an instrumental role. Her book, which is a well-researched diatribe against chain stores, received coverage in Business Week last week. I haven’t read the book yet, but judging by the [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Books, General, Save Kepler's by Rick
Monday, January 1st, 2007
People who don’t like reading
The Economist has a brief, interesting story about improving reading levels among British school children through a new plan that offers six-year-olds four months of everyday 30-minute one-on-one reading sessions.
At more than £2,000 ($3,900) per pupil, Reading Recovery is not cheap. But it may be a sound investment. The KPMG Foundation, a charity that has [...]
