Back in the day, the New Yorker magazine had an Olympian attitude and did not run letters. Spy magazine rectified this with a column, Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker. The New Yorker now runs letters, but Kieran Healy doesn’t have a comment section on his blog. Whassup with that?? I wanted to leave a comment saying this was funny. But there was no place for the comment. So I have to do it here.
So is the first page of his paper about nuance.
The first equation is obviously nonsense.
The second equation has a minor mistake (the square root needs to extend over second integral) after that it is, to quote Lord Kelvin, as obvious as 2+2=4.
Do I get to comment here, or will my posts be disappeared for asking hard questions?
Rsm:
Comments can get caught in the spam filter. You wouldn’t believe the level of spam that we get. In addition, there are no sharp lines distinguishing comments that are spam, trolling, or just off-topic. If you want to contribute to discussions on this blog, that’s great; if you just want to troll or bring up irrelevant topics, you’ll be better off on twitter, 4chan, or the comments section of your local newspaper. There are lots of places on the internet where you get into arguments with people on whatever topic you’d like. You can go there and ask hard questions, easy questions, whatever you’d like.
Perhaps Kieran Healy disabled comments because he doesn’t want to bother with moderation? I’ve Emailed him a few times to share that I really enjoyed a post or to ask some questions and I never get a response. Maybe he only wants to hear from his peers (i.e., other professors)?
Jordan:
I don’t know about Kieran’s rationale, but a few years ago I did express frustration that Uri Simonsohn doesn’t allow comments on his blog. I guess the main issue is that it takes time to read and respond to comments. I don’t mind doing this (as you can see here), but I can understand if Kieran, Uri, etc., feel they have better things to do.
I only ever saw about half a dozen issues of Spy, not enough to give me the feeling of longing and nostalgia that I sense in you, Andrew. But it’s not too late for me: it turns out the entire archive is available (free!) on Google Books.
Of course the vast majority of people have never seen Spy at all. Here’s a brief slice of what they’re missing: https://magculture.com/blogs/journal/kurt-anderson-talks-about-spy-for-first-time
Wow, some things are evergreen: check out the Great Expectations feature (the first piece) in the February 1994 issue of Spy. 28 years ago and it could have been written yesterday if you just replaced a few names (Herb Caen, Joe Montana). https://books.google.com/books?id=AXKlThqFFT0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false