Sally Mann is a photographer of some notoriety. She is also, it turns out, an amazingly good writer able to create word pictures every bit as nuanced and beguiling as her picture pictures. An interesting question is whether, had she not been a renowned photographer, we would ever have learned what a fine writer she is. Would she have been prompted to write her memoir had she not been invited to give the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard?

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Tim Harford is an economist, the FT's Undercover Economist, and I really enjoy what he does, wherever he does it. The FT, Books, his BBC radio show More or Less and also guest appearances on other podcasts. Aside from subscribing to More or Less, though, I don't actually stalk him to see what he's up to. So it was a pleasant surprise to find Tim's article The Problem With Facts drip out of the firehose I try to sip from. It's a fine article, about how Big Tobacco provided the canonical example of the field now known as agnotology. ¹

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Here's something I didn't know I needed: Jared Sinclair's new app Stormcrow

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On a recent flight, I read two articles that had been festering in my to-read list.

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Having decided seriously to jump the Quicken ship, I downloaded trial versions of four of my five original contenders (cutting out Money because it didn't obviously do anything about split transactions, which are a must). First impressions:

iBank is slick, possibly too slick for its own good. E...

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