Following up on my “review”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002484.html of “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582344167/henryfarrell-20 last week, there’s a very nice piece on the book at “N+1”:http://www.nplusonemag.com/strange.html, which has a lot more to say about the book’s “levelling streak” than I could fit in a blogpost.
I know about N+1 thanks to a conversation with Scott McLemee, who does a very interesting article on ‘big processes’ sociologist “Michael Mann”:http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i04/04a01001.htm for the Chronicle. There’s a short critical quote from David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist – this reflects a long standing argument (Laitin is “no great fan”:http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/Expand/ingenta?pub=infobike://sage/j292/2003/00000031/00000001/art00006 of the kinds of research that Mann and others like him are interested in).
Finally, “Cosma Shalizi”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/247.html makes it into _Physical Review Letters_, which I understand from my colleagues in the hard sciences is a pretty big deal. Congratulations.
{ 4 comments }
will 09.16.04 at 2:32 am
Ah, I noticed Cosma was in PRL when the list of abstracts arrived in my inbox. Congrats! I read his “notebooks” years before “blog” was even coined; they were superb even then.
will 09.16.04 at 2:35 am
Particularly I note his deep knowledge of both neoclassical econ (market socialism and analytic Marxism included) and complexity theory, a condition I can only envy.
Kieran Healy 09.16.04 at 4:31 am
He knows a fair amount of sociology too, the bastard. There ought to be some kind of law of conservation of erudition, such that any supernumerary knowledge he acquires about institutional theory should be complemented by me suddenly knowing a great deal more about, say, partial differential equations.
Cosma 09.16.04 at 9:37 pm
To all: many, many, thanks! The credit for the paper really goes to my co-authors, who did the heavy lifting. And any appearance of erudition on my part is purely due to my shameless habit of assuming an air of authority while holding forth on subjects about which I am profoundly ignorant.
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