Monday, September 04, 2006

Snuff makes your navel perk like a whelk

I try and wait to read the New Yorker in the actual paper edition, much more enjoyable than reading online, but I could not resist a great piece about Britain's Mass Observation movement by Caleb Crain. I've always been interested in the mass-observation thing (it fits with that very literary atmosphere of just-pre-WWII British crime fiction, Sayers and Allingham and such), but I became more acutely interested when I read (it was obliquely part of the research for Dynamite No. 1) Naomi Mitchison's wartime mass observation diary (Mitchison was the sister of the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, and also an interesting figure in her own right).
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9/04/2006 3:20 PM

    My problem with the online articles is that I tend to read them while at work, which means that I read a paragraph at a time as I tab through whatever other stories I'm also reading. With the print version, I lounge on a couch and nothing but a cat attacking my legs can distract me.

    But still, it's crucial to check the online version, as proven by your previous post. Thanks!

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  2. Anonymous9/04/2006 4:54 PM

    thanks for pointing to this lovely story.

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