Daniel Soar is an editor at the LRB.
Microsoft says that its brand-new search engine, Bing, delivers results that are just as good as those of its competitors. But Bing is no mere imitator, slavishly copying those that have gone before. Just compare a search for 'Bing market share' on Bing with the same search as performed by what Microsoft coyly calls the 'market leader’. Despite the undoubtedly unprejudiced algorithmic approach of both technologies, the results look very different.
There has, I hear, been much whispering in dark corners at the Palace of Westminster in recent days. But if the papers are to be believed, the darkest of dark whisperings have been taking place on the internet, in the form of the super-secret 'Hotmail conspiracy' to oust Gordon Brown. To recap: on Wednesday night, a few hours before polling opened for the European and local elections, the Guardianexclusively revealed that a group of parliamentary plotters had set up an anonymous webmail address, signonnow@hotmail.co.uk, in order to gather virtual signatories to a virtual letter calling for the PM to resign.
The ‘at’ sign, @, which fancy typographers refer to by its French name, arobase, is a once unremarked but now central glyph that rewards closer examination. Many claims are made about its genesis, among them that it began circulation in 16th-century Florence as a symbol for the anfora, a unit of commercial measurement then in currency. A few years ago, La Repubblica published a...
If you want to write about violence – if you want to tell it like it is – then you’re advised to keep it plain. We’re conditioned to think that real horror should be described as succinctly as possible, since superfluous words only distract from the act itself. Words are so often digressive that inserting them where they’re not wanted can be seen as evidence of a...
Every November, the books pages of British newspapers perform what ought to be a helpful service: they present lists of the best books of the year, to remind us of what we missed. It’s part of the general round of year-end round-ups – 2008’s most significant moments in politics, art, sport, cinema, crime – but it always happens that the annual filing from the world of...
Daniel Soar talks to Tom about Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons – how it fits with his earlier fiction, the relationship between world events and private histories, and McEwan’s addiction to...
Daniel Soar talks to Thomas Jones about the sixth taste, variously translated as ‘mouthfulness’, ‘thickness’ and ‘lingeringness’, apparently discovered by the Japanese company Ajinomoto,...
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