Month: October 2010
Why Do They Buy Buses Everyone Hates?
Stockholm has a great mass transit system, called SL, despite the annual problems when subway trains can’t handle the snow or the leaves on the tracks are the wrong kind for the commuter trains. But a few years ago, when…
Has the BBC Changed Its Podcast Policy?
One of my favorite radio programs is the BBC’s “In Our Time”. Every Thursday, except for a summer break, Melvyn Bragg and three varying and eloquent academic experts discuss what in Swedish would be called “idéhistoria”. Besides pure history, the…
eBookstores Not Ready for Primetime? No Nobel
Often when the Nobel Literature Prize is announced, I run down to the fairly large bookstore near work to see if they have anything by the new laureate in English. Sometimes they do, often the don’t. So I was looking…
Transcending the Kindle
Are eReaders the savior of newspapers? In the latest issue of “Wired” Steven Levy argues for the usefulness and more serious role of the Kindle compared to the iPad: “But longer, deeper plunges into literature—what the critic Victor Nell calls “ludic…