Belatedly getting round to posting some pictures from Ninfa earlier this spring. There’s not a lot one can say about the gardens without seeming like a total milquetoast. They’re romantic, they’re overgrown, they’re bursting with plants and full of ruins, they’re suggestive, they’re breath-taking....

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I don't believe this. Stephen J. Dubner, the journalist half of Freakonomics, has totally blown it. In the Freakonomics blog for the New York Times he writes:

The Economist is, almost inarguably, a great magazine.

That doesn’t mean it doesn't make the occasional mistake. Consider this lead f...

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Over at Language Log there's been a nice little kerfuffle over celebrity linguists. A commenter twitted¹ the denizens of Language Log Plaza for not paying sufficient attention to Noam Chomsky. So they paid her, and him, the slightly backhanded compliment of discussing, at perverse length, the Ch...

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If I were in the least bit insecure about this blog, I would welcome comments like this one:

First of all thank you for a such wonderfull topic, well i have to say it is difficult for me to say if i agree with you or not. I will read it for a second time and let you know what i think

Sure, i...

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If Malthus is wrong, then why is it necessary to prove him wrong again and again, every decade and every century?

Answers on a postcard, please.