For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files. You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 8
Friday’s Work

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files. You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 7
Town and Country

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files.

You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 6
Binds and Bands

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files.

You may also subscribe to have chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 5
Hard Feelings

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files.

Now you may also subscribe to have the chapters delivered to you by email.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 4
Relating

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 3
A Way Around

For the next while the Friday Fillip will be a chapter in a serialized crime novel, interrupted occasionally by a reference you might like to follow up. Both this chapter of the book and the whole story up to this point can be had as PDF files.

MEASURING LIFE
 
Chapter 2
Smell the Rain

After many hundreds of Friday Fillips, I’m going to try something different in this space. For the next while I’m going to do a “Boz” and publish a crime novel in episodes. Those of you who read the Fillip for leads to “interesting stuff” I’ve found on the internet needn’t fear: I’ll lift a theme out of each episode and interpolate notes on fresh findings that touch on that theme. I’m also going to gather the accumulating episodes on another website, so that people coming late to the Fillip can catch up with the story. My . . . [more]

Duncan probably had it right: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

It’s where we live — or where we are seen to live — and that’s the point of it, I suppose: communication. All those incredibly numerous and tiny muscles sculpting cheeks and lips, nuancing the skin around the orbits, telling our tales, often whether we like it or no. (The Latin proverb is “Vultus est index animi”: the face is the index of the mind, where “index” means informer or spy.)

This . . . vulnerability may be one of the reasons . . . [more]

It’s just shy of two months since Christmas, and half a dozen gift books, real books, are staring me in the face. Unread. Unopened. Lodged, in fact, atop a pile of other neglected and unread books on the table — a towering stack of reproach.

That’s the thing with unread books. They haunt you until you open them. They glare, stiff-spined. They upset coffee cups and martini glasses. They fall with bangs off bedside tables in the night. And the muttering, snuffling, wolf whistling, whining, and all round hailing from the bolder, more importunate tomes can get . . . [more]

. . . and octahedrons, and cuneiforms, and cross-stitches.

Music is weird. It has no known evolutionary advantage that might account for its existence, at least none that is agreed upon. As for social purpose, were it to disappear from the world, it’s not at all certain that anything would change. And although definition is always difficult and imperfect, it’s particularly hard to say in words what, if anything, makes music different from just noise.

Yet we keep at it, keep making music, hearing it in noise, and, some would argue, have done so even before we could talk about . . . [more]

You stretch, get out of bed, fling on something warm, and open the front door to gaze out at the day. If what you see is acres (or hectares) of fields or forests or snow or ocean, i.e. nothing, then… nevermind. Make your coffee, go back to bed, spend the day in your onesie — whatever. You’ve already provided yourself with the geographical solution to the problem of other people, the problem typically known as civilization. The rest of us, rejoicing in city life, must cope elsehow.

We do that basically by taking great care not to bump into each . . . [more]