2008

Jul

Hitchens, waterboarded

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the...
Jul 4th

The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar

Online, many Chinese are worried — about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of...
Jul 3rd
“Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public...”
— America’s Finest News...
Jul 2nd
Jul 2nd
That’s the front cover. Cool. I want to buy the whole...
Jul 2nd

method as metaphysics

Those who would use science to solve real human problems often must first translate those human...
Jul 2nd

Keats

Yet the consolations of poetry, as “Posthumous Keats” reminds us, last only as long as the poem...
Jul 2nd

Jun

Tyson Homosexual, champion sprinter

The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website… replaces the word “gay” in [Associated...
Jun 30th

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...
Jun 30th
Turns out that the story Gene Weingarten wrote last year...
Jun 30th

European men and the baby bust

A study released in February of this year by Letizia Mencarini, the demographer from the University...
Jun 28th
“Pixar may have earned awards and laurels as the pioneers of...”
— James Rocchi
Jun 28th
I am grateful to live in the Age of Pixar. I really am.
Jun 28th
Jun 26th
Jun 26th
Michael Kenna, via Monoscope
Jun 26th
Taipei 101 includes a 728-ton sphere locked in a net of...
Jun 26th
George Orwell explains how to make a nice cup...
Jun 26th
“No benign deity plucks television news-show hosts from their...”
— Hitchens on Tim...
Jun 23rd

world unlikely to end immediately

Physicists around the world are waiting with excitement as the final preparations for CERN’s...
Jun 23rd
“I don’t have pet peeves. I have deep, psychotic...”
— George Carlin
Jun 23rd
R.I.P.
Jun 23rd
Jun 21st

Jed Perl: a postcard from somewhere

Shortly after returning to New York, I went down to Philadelphia to visit the Barnes Foundation, a...
Jun 21st
Warch Watch
I love Dean Allen’s dog videos
Jun 20th
new sculpture at Pixar, via Scott Stevenson
Jun 20th
“There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are...”
— Dana Stevens on The Love Guru
Jun 19th
Please don't forget my 'other' new book
Jun 19th
morning in the Arboretum
Jun 18th
Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index...
Jun 17th

the rage of stickers

Bumper stickers such as “Make Love, Not War” and “More Trees, Less Bush” speak volumes about a...
Jun 17th
via Jon Hicks
Jun 16th

feelin' bad

The case that things are basically pretty good? Unemployment is 5.5%, low by historical standards;...
Jun 14th
the “El Greco” version of me, according to the...
Jun 12th
Jun 12th
Jun 12th
Benjamin Harrison
Jun 11th
Nixon
Jun 11th
Harding
Jun 11th

Sina Najafi on presidential doodles

The doodles are very different from president to president. Reagan, for example, who had dreams of...
Jun 11th

conflicts of interest

For a medical researcher, the failure to report income from drug companies is a serious ethical...
Jun 11th
Jun 10th
Jun 10th
from Cabinet magazine
Jun 10th

from Brian Williams's Commencement...

I come here today with a request for the Class of ‘08: We need you to fix the country —...
Jun 10th

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

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind...
Jun 9th

The feminist gender rift

I recently got tipsy with a group of ferociously successful second-wave lawyers, each of whom...
Jun 7th

Léon Krier's Poundbury

Krier conceived the town, still being built, as a single and continuous public space, organized...
Jun 7th
“Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing...”
— Léon Krier
Jun 7th
The lost rivers of London, some of which (according to Peter...
Jun 6th

healing

How did we come to pray so fervently for recovery from illness? As Heather Curtis notes at the...
Jun 6th
the weakness of religion
Jun 6th

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...
Jun 6th

the Church of England establishes its...

A meeting of the Church’s “parliament” was due to discuss whether clergy should be...
Jun 4th

sorry, you had your chance

If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for...
Jun 4th

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...
Jun 3rd
Jun 3rd

Johann Hari on Mark Steyn

Is there anything easier than defending the right to free speech for people you agree with? I love...
Jun 3rd
Stourhead in Wiltshire: the most beautiful landscape garden...
Jun 2nd

Milton in the grave

Milton died shortly after completing his revision of “Paradise Lost,” in 1674, and was buried in the...
Jun 1st

May

medievalists in Kalamazoo

There they spend up to four days delivering or listening to some of the 1,500 scholarly papers...
May 31st
“The Creation is a perpetual Feast to the Mind of a good...”
— Joseph Addison (1712)
May 27th
Swiss man makes a successful jump using a parachite designed...
May 27th
[Indexed]
May 27th
“When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and...”
— Flannery O’Connor
May 26th
An image from the Phoenix Mars Lander (more here)
May 26th
the ‘light echo’ of an exploding star (via...
May 25th

washboarding

I was overjoyed that Congress refused to override President Bush’s veto of a bill outlawing the...
May 25th

an extinct world

When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word...
May 24th

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...
May 23rd

footprints and gardens

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30...
May 23rd
May 22nd
at Lincoln Marsh this morning
May 22nd
Lynn Geesaman, Avery Island, Lousiana (2007)
May 21st

shaken, not stirred

Take the all-important issue of shaking rather than stirring the martini. In 1999, a group of...
May 21st
The Way to God
May 20th
Chess City, Kalmykia; via the weird Daniel Kalder
May 20th

the Diggers

In 1997, not long after I had first arrived in Moscow, my friend Sergei told me about the Diggers....
May 20th
A letter received last year at Fermilab; decoding under way
May 20th
“To the extent that the establishment depends on the...”
— J. Mitchell Morse (1972)
May 19th
Memo graphic design
May 19th
Hardman, On the City Walls, Chester (1955)
May 19th
E. Chambré Hardman, Birth of the Ark Royal (Liverpool,...
May 19th

Chris Adrian's tatoo

Inside, a young man, grumpy but not at all rude, was waiting. He was round and hairy and,...
May 18th
[NYT]
May 17th
Orazio Fumagalli, Figure Fragment, 1995
May 16th

art that stank

Robert Rauschenberg, the man who once said he wanted to act in the gap between art and life, has...
May 15th
Alberto Manguel’s library
May 15th
Warch Watch
Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham (courtesy Dwight Garner)
May 15th

the apostate

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is...
May 14th
May 14th
Homer and Mario untooned. Creepy.
May 14th

procrastination

Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of...
May 13th

Bach's notes

His music tends to work in all versions, I submit, because the notes-qua-notes are so good. Mozart,...
May 13th
“A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of...”
— Leszek Kolakowski
May 12th
Kris Martin, Mandi VIII (2006); interesting commentary here
May 11th

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...
May 11th
Lake Marmo, Morton Arboretum
May 10th
bluebells in the Morton Arboretum
May 10th
May 10th
davidjphooker: May 9th:Speaking Without a Head ...
May 10th
May 9th
this morning at the Morton Arboretum (just cellphone...
May 9th
May 8th
May 8th
simultaneous electrical storm and volcanic eruption, in...
May 8th

do the math

Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee...
May 8th

why not to be a philosopher

In the late 1940s, as Richard Rorty was finishing his undergraduate studies and considering a future...
May 7th

on the sadness of higher education

The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I’d taken on the...
May 6th
Textism
May 4th

American in Paris

The biggest change is the ban on smoking in public places, announced by former Prime Minister...
May 4th
May 3rd
Vertical House, via BLDGBLOG
May 3rd
Endgame in Brooklyn, with John Turturro as Hamm (story...
May 2nd

David Sedaris on smoking

When New York banned smoking in the workplace, I quit working. When it was banned in restaurants, I...
May 2nd
May 1st

Apr

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...
Apr 30th
I just noticed that A Million Penguins is...
Apr 30th

W. H. Auden, from "Atlantis"

Assuming you beach at last Near Atlantis, and begin That terrible trek inland Through squalid woods...
Apr 30th

the secret diary of . . .

For her biography of Louis XIV’s mistress author Veronica Buckley hit upon a startling,...
Apr 29th
“Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering...”
— Boris Johnson, Tory candidate...
Apr 29th

faith lived out

Jim Caviezel, the actor known for playing Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” had been outspoken...
Apr 28th

miscarriages

Even Ms. Shvarts’s central proposition — that the discomfort we feel at the word...
Apr 28th

Stevie Smith, "Sunt Leones"

The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena By indulging native appetites played what...
Apr 28th
portraitoftheartistasayoungman: Nicole Peterson’s Dante...
Apr 28th

Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Snow Melting"

Snow melting when I left you, and I took This fragile bone we’d found in melting snow Before I...
Apr 26th

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...
Apr 25th

Humanistic Judaism

On a recent chilly Friday night, a few dozen members of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism...
Apr 25th
“The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day,...”
— Christopher Hitchens
Apr 23rd

masterpieces on the internet?

Any facile comparison of “quality” across different media is asking for a kicking. But I’m going to...
Apr 22nd

English as a shouted language

China intends to teach itself as much English as possible by the time the guests arrive, and Li Yang...
Apr 22nd

an unknown pollutant

In 2004, for example, researchers on the Potomac River, downstream from Washington, D.C., found...
Apr 22nd

Radio Free Europe

“Radio Free Europe? Does that still exist?” Radio Free Europe—the Cold War news service...
Apr 22nd
Apr 21st
Stuart Franklin photo essay on trees
Apr 21st
Kottke mentioned this on Twitter a week or so ago, so...
Apr 21st
“Repetition alone will make something stick in a...”
— David Muhlenfeld, composer of...
Apr 21st
“No man can hear his telephone ring without wishing heartily...”
— H. L. Mencken
Apr 20th
bbum, sunlight on water (via a long exposure)
Apr 20th
two trees in a field
Apr 20th
aerial photograph of a lumberyard, from here via Kottke
Apr 20th
[here, via Monoscope]
Apr 19th

Czeslaw Milosz, "Veni Creator"

Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue...
Apr 19th

corruption

It’s always amazing to me that people think, “Because I thought this up, instead of...
Apr 18th

Bill James on Derek Jeter

In one way of looking at it, it makes intuitive sense that Derek Jeter could be the worst defensive...
Apr 18th

elites

Senator Obama seems honestly surprised by the furor his the-poor-cling-to-God-and-guns remarks...
Apr 18th
“That the contrastingly but equally gorgeous Rachel and Sarah...”