"his own heart is uncertain"
God has put this Word into the mouth of others in order that it may be communicated to us. When one...
Mar 2nd
children lying
Dr. Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has devoted much of her career to...
Mar 2nd
the Brooklyn life
As you may have heard, all the writers are in Brooklyn these days. It’s the place to be. You’re...
Mar 1st
the Cossack and the Jewish boy
One day, when he was seven or eight years old and foraging for something to eat, a Cossack rode down...
Mar 1st
Joshua Klein’s vending machine for crows
Mar 1st
David Brooks on WFB
When I was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called “Overdrive” in which he described...
Feb 29th
Jeff Mangum and the aftermath of Neutral...
It took Mangum years to rebuild himself after this spiritual crisis—and since part of that crisis...
Feb 29th
Anne Enright on James Joyce (from the...
Q. Almost every review of an Irish writer's work makes comparisons to James Joyce. Is it hard to get away from him?A. I don't want to get away from him. It's male writers who have a problem with Joyce; they're all "in the long shadow of Joyce, and who can step into his shoes?" I don't want any shoes, thank you very much. Joyce made everything possible; he opened all the doors and windows. Also, I have a very strong theory that he was actually a woman. He wrote endlessly introspective and domestic things, which is the accusation made about women writers - there's no action and nothing happens. Then you look at "Ulysses" and say, well, he was a girl, that was his secret.
Feb 28th
David and Goliath, from the Manga Bible
Feb 28th
E-Mail From Aunt Accidentally Opened
CHICAGO— An otherwise routine e-mail-checking session went wrong when college student Gwen Petersen,...
Feb 28th
I'm just sayin'
“True story. My apartment in ‘prime Williamsburg’ was broken into. The thieves...
Feb 27th
numbers
Dehaene’s work centered on an apparently simple question: How do we know whether numbers are bigger...
Feb 27th
it's complicated
“I hope today to complicate our notion of cahiers — grievances — and the role they played in...
Feb 27th
Scott McLemee on what bookshelves are for
Feb 27th
Malcolm in (rare) sunshine
Feb 26th
buy it here
Feb 25th
Tim Keller on C. S. Lewis
Lewis definitely lived at a time in which people were more certain across the board that empirical,...
Feb 25th
artwork from the new Classical Comics Macbeth
Feb 25th
[here]
Feb 23rd
the banning of the Legos
Carl and Oliver, both 8-year-olds in our after-school program, huddled over piles of Legos. They...
Feb 23rd
touring the Martin guitar factory
Feb 23rd
handwriting
The distance between handwriting and typography is at its greatest in the West. It’s been more...
Feb 22nd
One of a series of remarkable photos of the abandoned...
Feb 22nd
reasons to be truthful
In the 1990s, Channel 4 was making a documentary based on my life of Baden-Powell, and someone asked...
Feb 22nd
British poll: top twenty children's...
1 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C S Lewis 2 The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle 3...
Feb 22nd
commuting
This is what economists call “the commuting paradox.” Most people travel long distances...
Feb 21st
W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One"
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth...
Feb 21st
[here]
Feb 21st
Wrong Font Chosen For Gravestone
Feb 20th
a public display of punctuation
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not...
Feb 20th
Which of these things is not like the others?
Feb 19th
[here — thanks, Kottke]
Feb 19th
The Hamas bunny, Assud, promises to eat all the Jews
Feb 19th
Is It Christmas? (check back regularly for...
Feb 19th
Flatiron Building From Madison Square Park - Circa 1920...
Feb 19th
from JoyceImages
Feb 18th
“My goats watch me like computer geeks staring at a...
Feb 18th
Stephen Fry responds to the philistines
Lord help us all. “Pretentious drivel”, “better off with a good walk rather than...
Feb 18th
the Northern Lights seen from Sweden; here, via BLDGBLOG
Feb 18th
“Richard Yates belongs with Fitzgerald and Hemingway as the...”
— David Hare, quoted here
— David Hare, quoted here
Feb 17th
Robin Marantz Henig on the science of...
Feb 17th
an annotated blueprint for Google's new data...
Feb 17th
Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of...
Feb 15th
Oliver Sacks: arabesques of the brain
As a child, I was fascinated by patterns, starting with the patterns in our house — the square...
Feb 15th
Watch
Ooedo No Hikeshi play one of the classics of Western culture
Feb 14th
Bishop Tom Wright on Rowan and sharia
Feb 14th
what we don't know can't hurt us
The author of seven other books, [Susan Jacoby] was a fellow at the New York Public Library when she...
Feb 14th
Mike Steinberger is a very, very lucky...
During my visit to Cheval Blanc, I didn’t request a taste of the ‘47, and I wasn’t...
Feb 14th
the church and the theater
What belonged to the theater was brought into the church, and what belonged to the church into the...
Feb 14th
[indexed]
Feb 13th
a curiously symbiotic relationship
On July 1 1860, the sermon at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting...
Feb 12th
Hoefler and Frere-Jones on 19th-century typography
Feb 12th
scholarship wants to be free
Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their...
Feb 12th
An early design for the Google logo
Feb 12th
my post on Rowan
Feb 11th
"Nothing should be recognised which had...
The lecture was written as an opening contribution to a series on Islam and English Law mounted by...
Feb 11th
“It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of...”
— Rep. Tom Lantos, dead today at...
— Rep. Tom Lantos, dead today at...
Feb 11th
an excellent analysis of Rowan Williams's...
Feb 11th
Hotel Facebook
Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook,...
Feb 11th
Famous Authors Predict the Winner of the...
Overhead, the sun is a wrathful god. It is made to ravage a dying land. The boy stands in a dry...
Feb 11th
Tom Wright on the Resurrection
Wright: Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.TIME: That sounds a lot like... work.
Wright: It's more exciting than hanging around listening to nice music. In Revelation and Paul's letters we are told that God's people will actually be running the new world on God's behalf. The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the Garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it's a picture like the one that you get at the end of Revelation.
TIME: And it ties in to what you've written about this all having a moral dimension.
Wright: Both that, and the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their "souls going to Heaven." If people think "my physical body doesn't matter very much," then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn't matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.
Feb 10th
families then and now
About two-and-a-half years ago, my wife and I sat in a lawyer’s office trying not to think too...
Feb 9th
Lokesh Dhakar’s coffee drinks illustrated
Feb 9th
“Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the...”
— Evelyn Waugh to Graham Greene
— Evelyn Waugh to Graham Greene
Feb 9th
Watch
The Holmes Brothers
Feb 8th
settling
What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have...
Feb 8th
some thoughts on Steven Johnson and reading
Feb 8th
"Why are we large and yet weak?"
In 1860, at the climax of the Second Opium War, a joint English and French army marched on Peking...
Feb 8th
from a 14th-century illumination of Gratian’s...
Feb 7th
detail from Halfway Through (2006), one of Peter...
Feb 7th
San Clemente, Rome (courtesy of Michael Tinkler)
Feb 7th
davidjphooker:
via djph.files.wordpress.com
Feb 7th
David Hooker on arts and crafts
Feb 7th
a lobby card
Feb 6th
Ash Wednesday
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining We are glad to be scattered, we did...
Feb 6th
B. Z.
Archaeologists say they have now found the ashes, bones and other evidence of animal sacrifices to...
Feb 5th
Nicholas Lash on religion
In the Middle Ages, religion was the name of a virtue, a part of justice. Justice was the virtue of...
Feb 5th
Obama a Mac, Hillary a PC? I can't argue with...
Feb 4th
“Im Kampf zwischen dir und der Welt sekundiere der Welt.”
— Kafka
— Kafka
Feb 4th
our creations and God's
As Freud often pointed out, there is at the heart of humanity an impulse which yearns to tear it...
Feb 4th
Whistler, B. C.
Feb 3rd
Mt. Seymour, Vancouver, B. C.
Feb 3rd
Stanley Park, Vancouver, B.C.
Feb 3rd
Charles Simic in the morning
NTY: What kind of mood do you wake up in on most mornings?Simic: Full of pep! I get up at 5. I turn on the computer, and I start reading newspapers, and within a half an hour, I’m so full of energy and anger and ready to start the day.
Feb 2nd
topical application
The point of serious literary study - serious intellectual study altogether - is not personal...
Feb 2nd
Claudio Rodriguez, "Eugenio de Luelmo"
who lived and died near the Duero 1 When someone wakens with grace, so simple are the things beside...
Feb 1st
Watch
Feb 1st
the Brooklyn Bridge under construction
Feb 1st