New York cheesecake

Bill Madison presents the World’s Best Recipe for Authentic New York Cheesecake. Good reading for bakers and non-bakers alike.

Jonah Lehrer, Jonah Lehrer

Leopards, spots. Daniel Engber wonders: Is There Plagiarism in Jonah Lehrer’s New Book Proposal?

A related post
Proust Was a Neuroscientist was disappointing

Chicago possessives

Sometimes it helps to look things up. Sections 7.17 and 7.18 of The Chicago Manual of Style will make my typing life a little simpler:


[The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (2010).]

In 7.19 and 7.20, Chicago allows exceptions for nouns that are plural in form but singular in meaning (such as politics and the United States) and for “a few for . . . sake ex­pressions used with a singular noun that ends in an s end in an apostro­phe alone, omitting the additional s” (for goodness’ sake, for righteousness’ sake). But for all other singular words and names: ’s.

And now I’m trying to remember who it was who proclaimed, not long ago, that nobody writes “Charles’s friend.” Anyone know? The context was most likely a Strunk-and-White bashing, as Charles’s friend is the first example illustrating the first rule of usage in The Elements of Style.

[That first rule: “Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ’s.” The Elements of Style also recommends the apostrophe-only for names from antiquity. Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009) retains that distinction: “Biblical and Classical names that end with a /zǝs/ or /eez/ sound take only the apostrophe.” I wonder whether Bryan Garner (who wrote the Chicago chapter on grammar and usage) will follow Chicago in any later GMAU.]

Domestic comedy

“You missed my joke.”

“You missed my getting your joke and ignoring it.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[A note to my fellow husbands: sometimes the only way to determine the line between charming and impertinent is to cross it.]

No MOOCs

An excerpt from a letter in the June 10 New Yorker, responding to the magazine’s article about Harvard University and MOOCs. The writer, Lori Isbell, teaches English at Yavapai College, a community college in Arizona:

After twenty years of teaching, I am confident that what makes the most difference in the learning and the lives of students is one-on-one instruction and the kind of human interaction that only traditional classroom settings can provide. MOOCs aren’t about democratizing and furthering education; they’re about saving money, making money, and keeping money in the corrupt marriage between business and academe.

Yes, exactly, and all the futurist rhetoric in the world won’t make it otherwise.

Related posts
“A fully-realized adult person”
The New Yorker on MOOCs
Offline, real-presence education
San José profs nix Harvard MOOC

Digital-naïf watch

A word to the unwise: it is ill-advised to post a photograph of your college ID, with your full name and student-identification number, as proof that you are now “officially” a college student. It is also uncool.

Related posts
Digital naïfs
Digital naïfs in the news
The F word (Find)

[As I wrote in the first of these related posts, “Many so-called digital natives are in truth digital naïfs. The natives’ naïveté is considerable.”]

Brooklyn Castle

[Rochelle Ballantyne.]

The documentary Brooklyn Castle (dir. Katie Dellamaggiore, 2012) tells the story of the chess team from Brooklyn’s Intermediate School 318, a team that has won more national chess championships than any other. We watched last night, having played and won with the Netflix Gambit (that is, having managed the queue so as to get the film the day after its release on DVD). The film reminded me of Mad Hot Ballroom : here too we get to see absolute dedication to an art, in a film that is funny, happy, poignant, and inspiring. May everyone at I. S. 318 go far.

The school’s chess teacher and coach Elizabeth Spiegel, speaking in the film:

“Learning chess and becoming good at chess and having to solve your own problems of how you teach yourself things is fantastic for kids. Maybe in this world in which more and more kids can only concentrate for ten minutes, in fact it’s exactly what we need.”

Rochelle Ballantyne, a 318 alum, is now headed for college and is likely to become the first African-American female chess master.

Here’s the film’s website.

[Brooklyn: represent!]

At the Dr. Grabow plant

[Popular Mechanics, September 1970.]

“The machines that make Grabows have no name outside the factory, and no use outside pipe manufacturing. The factory has its own lingo heard nowhere else: machines called frazers, procedures known as tripoling”: from a look at life in the Dr. Grabow plant in Sparta, North Carolina.

Fraise (that’s the correct spelling) and Tripoli (spelled with or without a capital) are nouns new to me. The OED has fraise: “A tool used for enlarging a circular hole.” The fraise isn’t limited to pipemaking: an OED citation refers to marble-workers using this tool. Fraise is also French for strawberry, which makes an image search for the tool amusing. (Search for fraise tool instead.)

As for Tripoli, this OED definition sounded plausible to me: “A fine earth used as a polishing-powder, consisting mainly of decomposed siliceous matter, esp. that formed of the shells of diatoms; called also infusorial earth or rotten-stone.” A trip to Google Books clinched it:


[William Augustin Brennan, Tobacco Leaves: Being a Book of Facts for Smokers (1915).]

Here too, use extends well beyond pipemaking. (Tripoli buffing compound, “for polishing aluminum, stainless steel, and wood”: as advertised here.)

The last time I saw someone smoking a pipe, the bowl had three or four inches of cigar in it. Before that? I can’t remember when I last saw someone smoking a pipe. But I do remember seeing the name Dr. Grabow back in my tobacco-stained past.

And speaking of the past, the OED dates fraise to 1874; Tripoli, to 1601. Old-time ways in Sparta.

Thanks to Mike at Brown Studies for passing on the link to the Grabow story.

Feedly it ain’t

[This post follows from Feedly it is.]

I wrote about Feedly last night in the heady excitement of infatuation. But I soon began to see problems that will keep me looking for a better reader. The interface is (to my eyes) beautiful, but Feedly takes too many liberties with content, as I discovered when I looked at a few recent Orange Crate Art posts with images. There’s nothing complex about these posts, and they render without problems in Google Reader. Watch what happens to the post How to improve writing (no. 44). Here’s Blogger:



And Feedly:



Yes, Feedly has a strange habit of pushing images to the right, where they can look, well, dumb. Feedly also seems to dicker with text, dropping “(no. 44)” from this post’s title in list view.

Worse is what happens to the post The Thompson Twins. Here’s Blogger:



And Feedly:



The sequence of images has been flipped, which turns the accompanying explanation into gibberish.

And still worse is what happens to the post Orson Trail. Here’s Blogger:



And Feedly:



Here too the sequence has been flipped (though May 9 is back where it belongs). Small potatoes, sure, but what if these images illustrated, say, a before-and-after comparison or a how-to post? The potential for confusion seems vast, and it makes Feedly a service I cannot yet trust. Now I’m trying The Old Reader, which has its own frustrations, one of which is its limited access to older posts: “No posts below this line. Probably you have read them all.” Shopping around makes it clearer than ever to me just how well designed Google Reader is, and how great its loss will be to its users.

Feedly it is

Time is running out for Google Reader: the service ends on July 1. I have been waiting and watching, looking for evidence of some clear consensus about what to use instead. The choice seems to be Feedly. Seems to be Feedly: this is the impression I get from my online reading. I just took the plunge, and so far the water is fine.

Here’s a recent David Pogue column about Google Reader and Feedly. It played no part in my decision: I found it only after making the switch. LOL.

Reader, if you use Google Reader, what switch are you making?

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11:44 p.m.: Feedly it ain’t. More tomorrow.

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June 4: Here’s a reconsideration: Feedly it ain’t.