Letters Remain

Month: February 2012

  • Year Four in Review

    It’s been a quiet year on Lone Gunman with only 76 posts published over the last 366 days: but the response has been as great as ever. This year is a special one for Lone Gunman as it was four years ago today–during the last leap day–that the first post was published. It’s been a great…

  • The Inefficiencies of Local Bookstores

    We should not hold Amazon in contempt for pressuring local independent bookstores to the brink of closure and instead should embrace the company for taking advantage of inefficiencies, furthering a reading culture, and–believe it or not–helping us ‘buy local’ more effectively. In response to Richard Russo‘s recent New York Times article berating a recent not-so-well-considered Amazon promotion, Farhad…

  • The Good and Bad of Enumerated Lists

    Writing by enumeration–writing a ‘list of n things’–restricts you to a structure that is easier to produce and is easier for readers to follow and comprehend, but limits free thought. That’s one of many points that Paul Graham makes in an essay discussing the merits and disadvantages of writing enumerated lists. One obvious negative that Graham points out…