Daily Office: Thursday
¶ Matins: When you’ve read Amanda Bensen’s review of a new paperback about the orange juice biz, you may agree with us that the only acceptable alternative to squeezing your own is doing without. (Smithsonian; via MetaFilter)
¶ Lauds: Writing about the William Eggleston exhibition, “Democratic Camera,” which has reached Chicago, Ken Tanaka has three good tips for visitors. We’re particularly drawn to the second, which emphasizes the role of Mr Eggleston’s body of work on the appreciation of individual photographs. (The Online Photographer)
¶ Prime: In an entry at his New Yorker blog, John Cassidy explains why we saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming even though the bankers didn’t: we didn’t (and don’t) understand the first thing about risk models. (via Felix Salmon)
¶ Tierce: Carl Zimmer reports on “deep homology,” the appearance of similar clusters of genes across widely different species that do the same sort of things. For example, one module enables yeast cells to fix cell walls, and human beings to create blood vessels. Mysteries remain! (NYT)
¶ Sext: Jimmy Chen explains the many different flavors of “editor,” at HTMLGIANT. (“It just seems like a bunch of people calling one another fancy names.”)(via The Rumpus)
¶ Nones: Tired of worrying about Greece? Consider Hungary, where an authoritarian administration is about to take office while the value of the forint plummets. Edward Hugh has seen this coming, but what’s the satisfaction of that?. (A Fistful of Euros)
¶ Vespers: Vespers: In a short but poignant piece, Cindy Jane Cho, currently doing NGO work in Namibia, reads three books, two of them celebrated (The Catcher in the Rye and Middlemarch), one of them utterly unknown to us. The entry bears the unmistakable pong of yearning youth. (The Millions)
¶ Compline: As part of its valuable Backlist series, The Second Pass publishes Lila Garnett’s impressive review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Culture of Defeat: On Trauma, Mourning and Recovery, a book that is currently out of print. Never mind: Ms Garnett’s cogent paragraphs spell out an important message: defeat is bad for everyone, even winners. Is anything as toxic as the thirst for revenge?