Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

19 Apr 2003, 12:47 p.m.

Intellectual Time Waster

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2003 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

While researching books for a customer, I discovered that the University of Chicago Press posts tons of fascinating excerpts. Behind the scenes at talk shows, why hundreds of Chicagoans died in the 1995 heat wave and the mass media ignored it, apocrypha, Japanese-American draft resisters in World War II, Insiders' French, maps of gerrymandered districts, and more.