Closing some tabs

And with unusual finality - I was finally due for a new computer from Columbia (we're on a four-year cycle), it arrived yesterday and I had an emergency meeting this morning at 9:30 with a faculty desktop support guy who set it up all up for me - I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a lovely but complicated trip to Cayman, England and Iceland, and it is a boon to have this new tiny computer to travel with rather than the current BEHEMOTH!

(Which I will now leave in my office so that I have a computer permanently there, and it may be the source of future blog postings, but it will no longer be the main device....)

Links:

Neglected books still neglected, including a very funny one noted by Anthony Burgess (clearly a major source for his own somewhat neglected novel The Wanting Seed). (Via.)

Listen to all ten of August Wilson's plays for free between now and the end of August!

What would Daniel Kahnemann eliminate if he had a magic wand?

Jane Goodall on 55 years at Gombe.

Sarah Waters' ten rules for writing fiction.

A delightful roundup at the TLS on four recent books about the history of British cooking and Steven Shapin at the LRB on the history of tea (subscriber-only I think).

Hauntings

I have been following the coverage of Sarah Waters' new book The Little Stranger and thinking that I must get hold of a copy (here's the Bat Segundo interview, but Waters' own essay on how this book was inspired by Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair is the clincher!