Curiosities: SF Tour

Michael Lewis gave the 2012 Baccalaureate Address at Princeton University this year, and used his time to speak about life experience, the strange paths we take after graduation, and everyone's "debt to the unlucky." You can watch the speech here, or you can read the transcript here.

In The Nation, Mark Oppenheimer reviews Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts, which includes the New Yorker staff writer’s early works of criticism. The problem, he writes, with her and most Western critics? “She is a snob, but wishes she weren’t.” (ICYMI: we published a review a few weeks ago.)

I hope you had your Wheaties this morning, because this one is a doozy. Scientists at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics have discovered complex "fractal" sentence patterning in classic works of literature that is nearly identical to "ideal" mathematics. Maybe Finnegans Wake does make sense, after all.