et cetera

Laura Miller sets the record straight here.

After Jerry Fodor’s stab, the next issue of the LRB promises “Richard Rorty on philosophy after Kripke”—should be interesting.

From the New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year”, this blurb under a book by Alice Munro:

Her 11th collection of short stories about people who do what our neighbors do but far more vividly.

No, your neighbours are that vivid, and you don’t notice. That is what literature teaches: how to look. It’s striking, [...]

9 professional climatologists have started up a weblog, Real Climate, where they aim to correct media reporting of climate issues. Judging by the content already there, it looks like essential reading—already one of their posts points out a recent survey of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, finding that all 928 articles picked out with the [...]

I take my title from a Nature article reporting that, contrary to various folk tales you might hear from time to time, people cannot in general postpone their deaths until important events have passed. See:

Donn C. Young and Erinn M. Hade, “Holidays, Birthdays, and Postponement of Cancer Death”, in Journal of the American Medical Association, [...]