The best thing for books is more power to Amazon Amazon ( AMZN ) used to set the prices people paid for ebooks, but, thanks to an illegal price fixing conspiracy, they lost most of that power to publishers. Almost everyone -- probably even the big publishers -- would be better off if they got it…

This is a pretty long post, and I know that you could easily substitute another round of Angry Birds instead of reading it. I hope you’ll find it useful. One of the key elements of pricing is realizing that people have choices, and that substitutes are available. This is more nuanced than it sounds,…

PARIS — The black-and-white symbol looks like a saucepan with a roof for a lid. And if it sits next to an entry on a restaurant menu, it signals that the dish is “fait maison” — house-made. Or does it? A new consumer protection law meant to inform diners whether their meals are freshly prepared in…

In occasione dell’incontro “L’eroe epico tra medioevo e modernità”, svoltosi all’interno della mobilitazione studentesca contro la chiusura della Biblioteca di Fieravecchia (Siena), Salvatore Marco Ponzio ha intervistato Wu Ming 4 a proposito del suo saggio “ Difendere la terra di Mezzo. Scritti su…

Grep support for find/replace This may seem really nerdy, but for productions that have people who write AppleScripts to deal with issues, having a powerful Unix regular expression text tool like grep solves a lot of problems. The above apostrophe find/replace would be done with the grep pattern…

Con l’ articolo di Francesco Coniglione avevamo annunciato una serie di interventi sul problema della sottovalutazione della cultura umanistica e sul pericolo connesso al suo definanziamento, così rispondendo all’appello sottoscritto da R. Esposito, E. Galli della Loggia e A. Asor Rosa. Ecco ora un…

Quando lavoravo a Betlemme, ai tempi della prima guerra a Gaza, appesa a una parete del centro in cui facevo il volontario c’era questa mappa: Sembrano quattro cartine molto efficaci a mostrare la progressiva sottrazione di territorio a un futuro Stato palestinese, ricordo di aver pensato. Eppure…

Few literary phrases have had as enduring an after­life as “the two cultures,” coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous schism between science and literary life. Yet few people actually seem to read Snow’s book bearing that title. Why bother when its main point appears so evident?…

If the universe operates by fixed physical laws, what does it mean for us to have free will? That’s what C.S. Lewis considers with an elegant sidewise gleam in an essay titled “Divine Omnipotence” from his altogether fascinating 1940 book The Problem of Pain ( public library ) — a scintillating…

David Sparshott Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn You Autocorrect. But despite the inadvertent hilarity, the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how…

They ended up taking baths together all winter long. But it was only in March, when they were both in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, that they fell in love. “I realized,” says Herrera, who previously had found Beard a little dour, “that a New York winter is not the time to see the best in someone.”…

"Every functional exercise contains an essential bit of human capacity." -- Greg Glassman Greg Glassman, the guy who invented CrossFit, was a gymnast who’d gone feral. He’d grown up in the San Fernando Valley, then a cradle of world-class gymnasts. His high school sent a 16-year-old, Steve Hug, to…

Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time. My better half: “Are you sure about this? They’ll kill you.” Me: “Sure I’m sure. You can hardly expect me to write a series called Borderlines, about the strange lines that people draw to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them,’ and then finish it…

Is Germany finally going from "ex-WW2 bad-guy and Cold War pawn" to "highly effective role model country"? I hope so! http://t.co/4SMJzQd5Xw

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) [ Updated again — see note at end of post ] Very few heroes can survive scrutiny unscathed. They all have flaws, by virtue of being human. However, hero-worship blurs those flaws, leveling them: truly nasty aspects of a person’s personality or behavior become on par with…

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity — a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Year’s resolution has been to stop measuring my days by degree…

“Busy is a decision,” a wise woman once once reminded us . I often think about how our modern obsession with productivity is blinding us to the fact that being productive can be the surest way of lulling ourselves into a trance of passivity, where we coast through our lives day after day after day,…

Cambio l'auto dopo le ferie: guida alla scelta Sanzioni, Trump all'Europa: «O l'Iran o gli Usa» Marcinelle, Mattarella: «È memoria del coraggio dei migranti» L'Harley più costosa del mondo intarsiata con oro e diamanti  IL DIBATTITO DEGLI SCRITTORI Milano , 1 giugno 2014 - 08:38 La scuola italiana è…

Questa settimana in RoundUp : i dibattiti sul tema dell'innovazione, della nostalgia giornalistica e della cosiddetta disruption ; per le testate digitali la vera sfida è diventare davvero "significativi" per i lettori; gli utenti, intanto, sembrano preferire i contenuti leggeri senza ammetterlo, in…

Lavorare nell’editoria digitale a metà del 2014, e farlo nel mercato italiano, significa in primo luogo dover operare una riflessione sugli scopi e sui risultati a cui siamo giunti dopo anni di roboanti promesse e propositi rivoluzionari. Riflettere, cioè, sui problemi scottanti del nostro movimento…

Stories set in the future are often judged, as time passes, on whether they come true or not. “Where are our flying cars?” became a plaintive cry of disappointment as the millennium arrived, reflecting the prevailing mood that science and technology had failed to live up to the most fanciful…

“ Multitask Masters ,” by Maria Konnikova. There is generally an inverse relationship between how good people are at multitasking and how good they think they are. In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible:…

George R. R. Martin’s story suggests a new sense of what an author owes his readers. Illustration by DAVID HUGHES The writer George R. R. Martin left Hollywood in 1994, determined to do what he wanted for a change. He’d had some success in television, working on a new version of “The Twilight Zone”…

If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched. Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before: Here’s John Markoff of the…

Meet the writer behind the comic book that finally got sex right http://t.co/SjZzO58KvY

Much sense here (via @AtheneDonald) "Can engaging with public help your career in academia?" http://t.co/BoTWBREpLv

Why do little boys tend to behave differently from little girls? Why do boys and girls play differently, for instance, choosing different toys as their favorites? Ask these questions and you invite a firestorm — of more questions. Is the premise behind these queries even accurate? Aren't our sons…

Reading authors such as Donna Tartt can keep you thinking and dreaming, but take your time. Photograph: Bas Czerwinski/EPA D uring the last few weeks, my internet feeds have been inundated with links to Spritz , the new speed-reading application that lets you read a novel in less than 90 minutes.…

Claire Handscombe ha un problema di concentrazione online. Come molti frequentatori del web, clicca sui link che trova sui social network, ne legge alcune righe, cerca le parole attraenti, e poi si stufa e passa alla pagina successiva, dalla quale probabilmente si distrarrà altrettanto. «Ci dedico…

D ear Little One, As I write this, I’m sitting in the makeup aisle of our local Target store. A friend recently texted me from a different makeup aisle and told me it felt like one of the most oppressive places in the world. I wanted to find out what he meant. And now that I’m sitting here, I’m…

John Scalzi is the author of Old Man's War and other science fiction novels. He runs a blog, Whatever , where this commentary originally appeared. I got a Klout account a few months ago when it did that promotion of allowing its members to get an early view of the U.S. version of Spotify, and that…