Weekend Links

Posted by Matt

[Note I've changed the site settings so 5 entries will always display on the front page, since posting is so infrequent of late.]

As Language Hat points out, it is Vladimir Nabokov's birthday. There you will find an interesting bit of his Russian prose from the early novel The Defense. My own response to that book was lukewarm; maybe in the original language it is more memorable.

This post by Moebius Stripper makes all the stories I've heard about students dramatically failing tests seem like success stories. (I hope the student whose replies are scanned there doesn't find all the links to them floating around the Internet....)

Thomas Friedman's new book surely isn't worth reading, but Matt Taibbi's review of it in New York Press is pretty entertaining. He summarizes Friedman's mixed metaphors: "by the end—and I'm not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce."

Finally, the Chicago Tribune tells "the sordid tale of a desperate penguin."