2008

Hitchens, waterboarded

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the...

The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar

Online, many Chinese are worried — about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of...

“Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public...”
— America’s Finest News...

That’s the front cover. Cool. I want to buy the whole...

method as metaphysics

Those who would use science to solve real human problems often must first translate those human...

Keats

Yet the consolations of poetry, as “Posthumous Keats” reminds us, last only as long as the poem...

Tyson Homosexual, champion sprinter

The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website… replaces the word “gay” in [Associated...

Brian Appleyard's least favorite book

The Awkward Age by Henry James This late (1899) book marks the beginning of the end for James, and...

Turns out that the story Gene Weingarten wrote last year...

European men and the baby bust

A study released in February of this year by Letizia Mencarini, the demographer from the University...

“Pixar may have earned awards and laurels as the pioneers of...”
— James Rocchi

I am grateful to live in the Age of Pixar. I really am.

Michael Kenna, via Monoscope

Taipei 101 includes a 728-ton sphere locked in a net of...

George Orwell explains how to make a nice cup...

“No benign deity plucks television news-show hosts from their...”
— Hitchens on Tim...

world unlikely to end immediately

Physicists around the world are waiting with excitement as the final preparations for CERN’s...

“I don’t have pet peeves. I have deep, psychotic...”
— George Carlin

R.I.P.

Jed Perl: a postcard from somewhere

Shortly after returning to New York, I went down to Philadelphia to visit the Barnes Foundation, a...

new sculpture at Pixar, via Scott Stevenson

“There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are...”
— Dana Stevens on The Love Guru

Please don't forget my 'other' new book

morning in the Arboretum

Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index...

the rage of stickers

Bumper stickers such as “Make Love, Not War” and “More Trees, Less Bush” speak volumes about a...

via Jon Hicks

feelin' bad

The case that things are basically pretty good? Unemployment is 5.5%, low by historical standards;...

the “El Greco” version of me, according to the...

Benjamin Harrison

Nixon

Harding

Sina Najafi on presidential doodles

The doodles are very different from president to president. Reagan, for example, who had dreams of...

conflicts of interest

For a medical researcher, the failure to report income from drug companies is a serious ethical...

from Cabinet magazine

from Brian Williams's Commencement...

I come here today with a request for the Class of ‘08: We need you to fix the country —...

from J. K. Rowling's Commencement...

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind...

The feminist gender rift

I recently got tipsy with a group of ferociously successful second-wave lawyers, each of whom...

Léon Krier's Poundbury

Krier conceived the town, still being built, as a single and continuous public space, organized...

“Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing...”
— Léon Krier

The lost rivers of London, some of which (according to Peter...

healing

How did we come to pray so fervently for recovery from illness? As Heather Curtis notes at the...

the weakness of religion

Peggy Noonan on Obama

A friend sent, by instant message, the AP flash that ran at 16:56 ET on 06-03-2008. There it was...

the Church of England establishes its...

A meeting of the Church’s “parliament” was due to discuss whether clergy should be...

sorry, you had your chance

If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for...

Anthony Lane on "Sex and the City"

Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern...

Johann Hari on Mark Steyn

Is there anything easier than defending the right to free speech for people you agree with? I love...

Stourhead in Wiltshire: the most beautiful landscape garden...

Milton in the grave

Milton died shortly after completing his revision of “Paradise Lost,” in 1674, and was buried in the...

medievalists in Kalamazoo

There they spend up to four days delivering or listening to some of the 1,500 scholarly papers...

“The Creation is a perpetual Feast to the Mind of a good...”
— Joseph Addison (1712)

Swiss man makes a successful jump using a parachite designed...

[Indexed]

“When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and...”
— Flannery O’Connor

An image from the Phoenix Mars Lander (more here)

the ‘light echo’ of an exploding star (via...

washboarding

I was overjoyed that Congress refused to override President Bush’s veto of a bill outlawing the...

an extinct world

When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word...

Arendt and the problem of evil

In 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote that...

footprints and gardens

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30...

at Lincoln Marsh this morning

Lynn Geesaman, Avery Island, Lousiana (2007)

shaken, not stirred

Take the all-important issue of shaking rather than stirring the martini. In 1999, a group of...

The Way to God

Chess City, Kalmykia; via the weird Daniel Kalder

the Diggers

In 1997, not long after I had first arrived in Moscow, my friend Sergei told me about the Diggers....

A letter received last year at Fermilab; decoding under way

“To the extent that the establishment depends on the...”
— J. Mitchell Morse (1972)

Memo graphic design

Hardman, On the City Walls, Chester (1955)

E. Chambré Hardman, Birth of the Ark Royal (Liverpool,...

Chris Adrian's tatoo

Inside, a young man, grumpy but not at all rude, was waiting. He was round and hairy and,...

[NYT]

Orazio Fumagalli, Figure Fragment, 1995

art that stank

Robert Rauschenberg, the man who once said he wanted to act in the gap between art and life, has...

Alberto Manguel’s library

the apostate

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is...

Homer and Mario untooned. Creepy.

procrastination

Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of...

Bach's notes

His music tends to work in all versions, I submit, because the notes-qua-notes are so good. Mozart,...

“A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of...”
— Leszek Kolakowski

Kris Martin, Mandi VIII (2006); interesting commentary here

the end of a lexicographical era

The future is here, and the immortal O.E.D., the one that lives in bound pages last published...

Lake Marmo, Morton Arboretum

bluebells in the Morton Arboretum

davidjphooker: May 9th:Speaking Without a Head ...

this morning at the Morton Arboretum (just cellphone...

simultaneous electrical storm and volcanic eruption, in...

do the math

Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee...

why not to be a philosopher

In the late 1940s, as Richard Rorty was finishing his undergraduate studies and considering a future...

on the sadness of higher education

The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I’d taken on the...

Textism

American in Paris

The biggest change is the ban on smoking in public places, announced by former Prime Minister...

Vertical House, via BLDGBLOG

Endgame in Brooklyn, with John Turturro as Hamm (story...

David Sedaris on smoking

When New York banned smoking in the workplace, I quit working. When it was banned in restaurants, I...

David Wright, "Pantoum and Variation on...

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, to cause the Lord of bliss to bear a verse and cast away, to...

I just noticed that A Million Penguins is...

W. H. Auden, from "Atlantis"

Assuming you beach at last Near Atlantis, and begin That terrible trek inland Through squalid woods...

the secret diary of . . .

For her biography of Louis XIV’s mistress author Veronica Buckley hit upon a startling,...

“Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering...”
— Boris Johnson, Tory candidate...

faith lived out

Jim Caviezel, the actor known for playing Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” had been outspoken...

miscarriages

Even Ms. Shvarts’s central proposition — that the discomfort we feel at the word...

Stevie Smith, "Sunt Leones"

The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena By indulging native appetites played what...

portraitoftheartistasayoungman: Nicole Peterson’s Dante...

Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Snow Melting"

Snow melting when I left you, and I took This fragile bone we’d found in melting snow Before I...

Wendell Berry, from "The Body and the...

The concept of health is rooted in the concept of wholeness. To be healthy is to be whole. The word...

Humanistic Judaism

On a recent chilly Friday night, a few dozen members of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism...

“The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day,...”
— Christopher Hitchens

masterpieces on the internet?

Any facile comparison of “quality” across different media is asking for a kicking. But I’m going to...

English as a shouted language

China intends to teach itself as much English as possible by the time the guests arrive, and Li Yang...

an unknown pollutant

In 2004, for example, researchers on the Potomac River, downstream from Washington, D.C., found...

Radio Free Europe

“Radio Free Europe? Does that still exist?” Radio Free Europe—the Cold War news service...

Stuart Franklin photo essay on trees

Kottke mentioned this on Twitter a week or so ago, so...

“Repetition alone will make something stick in a...”
— David Muhlenfeld, composer of...

“No man can hear his telephone ring without wishing heartily...”
— H. L. Mencken

bbum, sunlight on water (via a long exposure)

two trees in a field

aerial photograph of a lumberyard, from here via Kottke

[here, via Monoscope]

Czeslaw Milosz, "Veni Creator"

Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue...

corruption

It’s always amazing to me that people think, “Because I thought this up, instead of...

Bill James on Derek Jeter

In one way of looking at it, it makes intuitive sense that Derek Jeter could be the worst defensive...

elites

Senator Obama seems honestly surprised by the furor his the-poor-cling-to-God-and-guns remarks...

“That the contrastingly but equally gorgeous Rachel and Sarah...”