In Salon, Laura Miller discusses two new studies showing a correlation between the number of books in a child’s household and the level of education that child’s likely to attain: “Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.”
Book ownership and education
New Release Day Continued
A couple more big name books out in paperback this week: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Next by James Hynes. (Thanks, Dan)
The Long Goodbye
A lot of writers have alter-egos, but few are as interesting as Benjamin Black, the crime-writing persona of Irish novelist and Year in Reading alum John Banville. The author’s new novel adds an entry to the saga of a crime-fiction icon: Raymond Chandler’s Angeleno detective, Philip Marlowe.
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Algorithmic Forecasting
The Financial Times takes a detailed look at the Financial Computing Centre, home of future quants, where Michael Galas is working to build “a hedge fund without employees” and a crop of PhD candidates are using social media to predict the markets. Could these algorithms one day spill beyond finance, and influence education or social sciences?
Culture Club
Fifty years ago, the New York Review of Books published their first issue.
Remarks on Color
Recommended Reading: On Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. “They have many things in common, but where they connect most strikingly is in their shared suspicion of theory and their emphasis on the visual.”