unidentifed
{Dennis Kucinich] confirmed an account in actress Shirley MacLaine’s book that he saw a UFO at her...
Oct 31st
Oct 31st
Oct 31st
Wainwright of the fells
The solitary sage of the Lake District, who used to hide from fellow walkers and deny his name if...
Oct 31st
the constricting circle
As I grew sicker, I had what for me was an extremely comforting insight. I came to view serious and...
Oct 31st
Oct 30th
Oct 30th
Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if...
Oct 30th
the inheritors
Thus reported the Associated Press on Tuesday, October 16, 2007: “The nation’s first...
Oct 29th
toothpicks
Asserting that “picking one’s teeth is believed to be the oldest human habit,” Petroski suggests...
Oct 27th
Ché's lock
A lock of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s hair has been bought for $100,000 (£50,000) by...
Oct 26th
To Christ Our Lord
The legs of the elk punctured the snow’s crust And wolves floated lightfooted on the land Hunting...
Oct 24th
Malcolm at four months
Oct 24th
be still, my heart
Leopard is a legitimately big deal. It’s underhyped compared to iPhone, and yet unlike iPhone,...
Oct 24th
a word to my readers (all four of them)
I won’t be making many posts over the next couple of weeks: I’m outrageously busy and...
Oct 19th
Van Damme
Jean-Claude Van Damme started out in life as a baby, which was tremendously frustrating for him...
Oct 19th
On the Death of Friends in Childhood
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell; If...
Oct 19th
Arrangements with Earth for Three Dead...
Sweet earth, he ran and changed his shoes to go Outside with other children through the fields. He...
Oct 19th
fictional sales
By mid-August, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach had reached sales of 100,000, an astonishing...
Oct 19th
after the year of living biblically
My year of living biblically was intense, spiritually speaking. And it took me through a whole pu-pu...
Oct 18th
“I don’t have much time for the kind of site where...”
— Ian McEwan
— Ian McEwan
Oct 18th
Watch
Oct 18th
BibliOdyssey is now a book
Oct 18th
Aequam memento (Horace, Odes II.3)
When things are bad, be steady in your mind; Dellius, do not be Too unrestrainedly joyful in...
Oct 17th
a post of mine hardly anyone read
Oct 17th
winning friends and influencing people —...
Mr. Wex addresses most of the important life situations: meeting and greeting, food and drink,...
Oct 17th
the infamous Dr. Crippen
The infamous Dr Crippen who was hanged in 1910 for poisoning and dismembering his wife may have been...
Oct 17th
The Arcade Fire and end-of-the-world...
In May, I went with a friend to see the Canadian indie-rock band Arcade Fire perform at the United...
Oct 16th
sleep
According to surveys by the National Sleep Foundation, 90 percent of American parents think their...
Oct 16th
Oct 16th
This fiery figure is being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave.
The...
Oct 16th
what a shame
One of the key religious themes of Philip Pullman’s award-winning series of children’s...
Oct 15th
the most important moment in American...
General Washington drew from his coat a parchment copy of his appointment as commander in chief,...
Oct 15th
informational cascades
The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But...
Oct 14th
Sir Lord Baltimore eats humble pie
Proving old stories wrong isn’t the only allure of antedating. Some antedatings give us a more...
Oct 14th
"the job is proving difficult"
GUWAHATI, India, Oct. 13 (AP) — About 100 wild elephants converged on a river island in northeast...
Oct 14th
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roma (1959)
Oct 13th
Fraser Speirs
Oct 13th
lessons in parenting
The mother of a 14-year-old boy accused of planning an armed attack on a suburban Philadelphia high...
Oct 13th
Jerry Fodor on adaptationist stories
The years after Darwin witnessed a remarkable proliferation of other theories, each seeking to...
Oct 12th
bamboccioni
A whopping one-third of Italian men over 30 still live at home with their parents but now the...
Oct 12th
offloading data onto silicon
This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were...
Oct 11th
from the Wikipedia listserv
Since early this year, and for the first extended period in Wikipedia’s history, the activity...
Oct 11th
the age of the troubadour returns
When Radiohead quietly divulged plans to let fans name their price for the digital download of its...
Oct 11th
49 Up
The examined life: You won’t find that on reality TV. You may forget about it in your own...
Oct 10th
functional Asperger’s
“When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic channels, it’s like having...
Oct 10th
a possible (likely?) cover
Oct 9th
Fraser Speirs
Oct 9th
Sentences
Oct 9th
losing our taste for liberty
Some of these episodes were trivial, some significant. Some were about trying to prevent speech...
Oct 9th
may it be so. . .
the legal battle that’s kept The Lord of the Rings’ prequel, The Hobbit, hung up for...
Oct 8th
intangible wealth
Two years ago the World Bank’s environmental economics department set out to assess the...
Oct 8th
the American invasion of England
Since the 19th century, gray squirrels, an American import, have been overtaking Britain’s native...
Oct 7th
Genesis 1 (Teh Holiez Bibul, lolcat...
1. In teh beginnin Invisible Man was invisible, and he maded the skiez and da earths, but he did not...
Oct 7th
from the Guardian (London)
AM Homes: Looking back at your career, what surprises you most?Louise Bourgeois: That I was so persistent.
AMH: What does it mean to you to be "recognised" by the art world and the public?
LB: It allows you opportunities.
AMH: When you think about this retrospective, what do you hope it accomplishes?
LB: That people will understand me.
AMH: What gives you joy?
LB: To do my work.
AMH: What concerns you most these days?
LB: To be understood.
AMH: What do you look to for inspiration?
LB: Through my interaction with other people.
AMH: How would you describe the evolution of your work?
LB: I understand myself better and better.
AMH: What are your biggest sources of inspiration?
LB: I want people to like me.
Oct 7th
Christopher Hitchens on Second...
Mark Daily wasn’t yet finished with sending me messages from beyond the grave. He took a pile...
Oct 6th
The Florist's Daughter
HAMPL, Mary Marum Age 85 Mary Catherine Ann Teresa Eleanor Marum Hampl born July 26, 1917, in St....
Oct 6th
“I’m an internet expert too.”
— North Korean President Kim...
— North Korean President Kim...
Oct 5th
rational choice theory in practice
craigslist post: I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m...
Oct 5th
Oct 5th
the best news of the month, perhaps the...
Trouble At’ Mill, to be shown on BBC1, is in pre-production now, shooting starts in January, it will...
Oct 5th
“Multitasking, a definition: ‘The attempt by human...”
— Walter Kirn again
— Walter Kirn again
Oct 5th
death by multitasking
Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index...
Oct 5th
ambivalence about Hillary
Why, then, are so many of the most liberal and educated women ambivalent about Hillary? Perhaps it’s...
Oct 5th
red state real estate, blue state real...
Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both...
Oct 5th
“graphic literary criticism”: László...
Oct 5th
Wilkens to Thomas to Marbury
To travel from Lenny Wilkens to Isiah Thomas to Stephon Marbury is to travel an enormous distance in...
Oct 4th
pictures from a Chinese toy factory (via...
Oct 4th
ignoring things
For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it’s time for them to help us...
Oct 4th
"poetry has some reach into reality...
You cannot really know a religion from the outside. That is to say, you can know everything about a...
Oct 3rd
"The Tay Bridge Disaster," by William...
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives...
Oct 3rd
"A Tragedy," by Theophile Marzials
Death! Plop. The barges down in the river flop. Flop, plop, Above, beneath. From the slimy...
Oct 3rd
George Mallory, conqueror of Everest?
A mountaineering expert will today claim that Sir Edmund Hillary was not the first man to scale...
Oct 2nd
Google's damage
The damage Google has done to the world is largely invisible. Google got big by keeping ads small....
Oct 2nd
Facebook, I hardly knew ye
Oct 2nd
Reason magazine's inverview with Ayaan...
Hirsi Ali: Right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.Reason: Don't you mean defeating radical Islam?
Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it's defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It's very difficult to even talk about peace now. They're not interested in peace....There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive, who don't all follow the rules of Islam, but there's really only one Islam, defined as submission to the will of God. There's nothing moderate about it.
Reason: So when even a hard-line critic of Islam such as Daniel Pipes says, "Radical Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution," he's wrong?
Hirsi Ali: He's wrong. Sorry about that.
Oct 1st
"That would be so God."
When I was young, they told me that when I died and went to Heaven, the angels would take me into a...
Oct 1st
saving civilization
Founded in 1994 by the elders of a fast-growing and radically conservative church, New St. Andrews...
Oct 1st
Charles Taylor on sex and Christianity
[I]n the Victorian era, in both England and America[,] sex was meant to bond the couple. Sex was...
Oct 1st
Ian Buruma allows a place for faith
I have never personally had either the benefits nor misfortunes of adhering to any religion, but...
Oct 1st
WP:NPOV
As Wikipedia ages, its editors increasingly write in a bureaucratic patois thick with internal...
Oct 1st