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Portrait of a journalist
The strange subtheme of David Samuels’ New Yorker portrait of John Coster-Mullen, a man obsessed with the truth about the first atomic bombs, is actually journalism itself:
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What we leave out when we write
I was first introduced to the economic concept of opportunity cost as I sat through eucharist as a young chorister, listening to a section of the liturgy that asked forgiveness for “the good we have not done.” The opportunity cost of every moral act was “the good left undone.” For Mark Twain the cost of…
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A Christmas Ghost Story
It being the night before Christmas and the season for ghost stories, I thought I would pass on probably the shortest ghost story I know (and I’ve cut it short). It is from the pen of the (head)masterly M.R. James. A classic tale, it even merits its own scholarly article – “The Rules of Folklore”…