This is www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=675732128's Typepad Profile.
Join Typepad and start following www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=675732128's activity
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=675732128
Recent Activity
To put it another way: there's a difference between "well executed" and "worth doing".
McEwan's "Saturday" left me cold for the same reasons: it was very well-observed, everything in it rang true, but I felt there was an underlying lack of life in it.
So Good It's Bad
According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad — so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed — that they’re actually rather good. 'Solar,' the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good — so ingenio...
You should try to get to Turkey. Everyone speaks highly of the southern coast of Anatolia and the Biblical ruins there. For me, the week I spent in Istanbul in 2008 was electrifying.
(Signed in via Facebook, but it doesn't seem to get my name right -- this is William Whyte)
Impressions and Lessons from Cyprus
I spent the last two weeks in North and South Cyprus. It is a beautiful country! I had the opportunity to meet many businesspeople, government officials, journalists, and students. Here's what I learned: 1. A Divided Country. The first thing to say about Cyprus, both because it's the reality...
And yet in some ways American discourse is more formal than discourse in other Anglophone countries. (I'm Irish, living in the US). American "serious" papers seem unbearably stuffy compared to the Guardian or even the Telegraph. Former Senators are still addressed as "Senator" in the media, while in the UK even Tony Blair would now be addressed as "Mr. Blair". You've definitely captured something valuable, but it's not as cut-and-dried as formal v casual.
The Ethos of Casualness
1. America was a start-up created by a dozen or so entrepreneurial people who were rebelling against an aristocratic, overbearing empire. They were scrappy, quick on their feet, smart, hard working as hell, and (mostly) open-minded to whoever could help their improbable cause. Kind of like Silic...
Subscribe to www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=675732128’s Recent Activity