“Enhanced” is the word of the day for e-books. It strikes fear into the hearts of some authors, and maybe some readers, too. There is the question of hyperlinks. Let’s say my book begins this way: The police in the small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, worried briefly in 1974 … One doesn’t want the reader yanked away to a page listing the Great Luxury Hotels of Los...
The keen-eyed among you have asked why I spell Benoit one way here (and in Chaos) and a different way, with a circumflex atop the i, in the New York Times Magazine. The answer is that the newspaper of record has erred. There was a complex late-night accident, it seems. Anyway, it’s correct this way: Benoit Mandelbrot. For the record.
I’m working on a short piece about Benoit Mandelbrot for the Times Magazine’s year-end “Lives They Lived” issue, and I came across this curiosity in his (as he called it) “Scrapbook.” It’s an item from The Bulletin (Australian weekly magazine now, sadly, defunct) written in February 1990 by Charles Boag. The reporter, in Sydney, observed “a big well...