Cast Your Vote for the 2011 Name of the Year
t’s time for the annual Name of the Year contest. The 2008 winner, Destiny Frankenstein, is still our favorite, but there are some strong contestants this year. Among them: Sanmorteeno Battle, Yolanda Supersad, and Dr. Loveday Conquest. Cast your vote here. Read More »
Quotes Uncovered: Youth and the Young
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research. Read More »
The New and Improved Coup d’etat
Sometime around 1991, the standard coup d’etat morphed into something else entirely, according to a new paper by Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans: “[W]hereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed the leader durably in power, after that the picture reverses, with the majority of coups leading to competitive elections.” Read More »
Ten Things You Need to Do if You Were Hired Today
The woman right next to me was alive one second, then a taxi came up on the sidewalk of 42nd Street between 6th and 7th Avenue, hit her and veered off, and now the woman was dead. This happened on the first or second day of my job at HBO. I tried to call 911 on the payphone (there were still payphones in August, 1994), and then I had to go. The woman was dead. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 