Amazon.com’s recommendations to its shoppers—the “Best Value” pairings and also the “Kevin’s Store” tab that greets me at the top of the page, the “Hello, Kevin J. H. Dettmar. We have recommendations for you,” at the start of every new session, the “Customers with similar searches also purchased” pitch, and so on—are generated by what [...]
[Gentle Readers, 1 more week of classes! Mountains of papers to grade! You'll forgive me, please, if I fall back on a piece of older writing for this week's Mystery Science Auditorium---a piece that will take us through the weekend, in fact, on the film version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. I hope you'll enjoy [...]
[Final installment in a three-part posting, republishing an essay that first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last September.--KD] I’ve already suggested that for some of us, the appeal of the bad voice is that it could be ours; more generally, we respond to bad voices because they sound so frail, so human. There’s [...]
Cover me when I run Cover me through the fire . . . Cover me, darling please –Peter Gabriel, “Shock the Monkey” So, I should have listened to Paul. I was visiting him in Philadelphia last week, and when he picked me up at the train station, he had just turned off Peter Gabriel’s Scratch [...]