I was tempted to read "Atonement" by Ian McEwan after having watched the eponymous film based on the novel. The film was good, but a novel has more space to develop the characters and present their thoughts. The downside of having watched the film based on a novel before having read it is that it constrains your imagination to be based on the scenes and the actors in the film.

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Granta is a quarterly magazine dedicated to new writing. It usually contains a motley collection of fiction, essays, photographs, poems, etc. Granta 100 is a special issue celebrating the 100^th edition of this magazine featuring contributions from the likes of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, etc.

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In "The Calculus Wars", Jason Bardi writes about the bitter fight in the beginning of the 18^th century between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz over the right to be known as the inventor of calculus. Since this episode paints an extremely unflattering picture of the two great men, it is either ignored or only mentioned in passing by most authors writing about the history of mathematics.

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With a title like "The Little Book That Beats the Market", this book might appear to be peddling nothing more than snake oil to gullible people looking to make money from the stock market. It still merits a look since the author Joel Greenblatt is a respected value investor and a professor, who started and managed the hedge fund Gotham Capital that achieved an average annual return of 40% over more than 20 years.

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I have once again slightly reorganised this website in order to make it a bit faster to load, a bit easier to use and a lot easier to maintain. Among the major user-visible changes are a website feed, per-post pages, lighter aggregating pages and a website-specific Google search.

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