That's what Atlantic tech blogger Alexis Madrigal calls Google's Books Ngram Viewer. Google has scanned about 10 percent of all the books ever published. Enter any word or phrase into the search box, and the viewer returns a graph of its frequency of appearance in books published over the last two centuries. Note that the searches are case sensitive, and you can compare the relative frequencies of up to four five different words or phrases, separating them by commas in the search box. Say, "Nova Scotia" and "Ontario," for example: Try it yourself, and please send me any interesting pairings you come up with. Madrigal's...

16 December, 2010

Do not miss Jeffrey Goldberg's continuing posts about his surprise command audience with Fidel Castro last week. First instalment here; second here. Goldberg is a perplexing figure, a former member of the IDF, quick to call anti-semitism against anyone who balks at his lockstep advocacy of troubling Israeli policies. He caused a stir recently with an Atlantic cover story speculating about an impending Israeli nuclear strike against Iran. Many regarded the article as thinly disguised tub-thumping for such an attack (see here and here), while others demurred. In the end, the Atlantic held an extensive, online print debate about the issue — which...

08 September, 2010

A resident of England, who spends much of his time in Nova Scotia working on Seaside's rural high-speed Internet project, writes from Tel Aviv, where he is attending a wedding: An Irish fiddle band is providing the music for the wedding. The band members are all Israelis. I was chatting with one of them, and he asked what I did. I told him about Seaside and spending half my life in Canada. "I'm going to Canada in the autumn," he said. "I'm going somewhere called Cape Breton, for a festival called Celtic Colours." So a Londoner visiting Israel meets an Israeli playing in...

21 May, 2010