Prester John as virtual as he was virtuous, the legend literally too good to be true.
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Washington DC as a big, red heart, pumping life-blood through the arteries of the nation’s body? Few Americans will view their oft-reviled capital as favourably as this metaphor suggests. However, […]
The Democrats may not be in as much trouble as everyone thought. Although Pollster still has them trailing Republicans by a point on a generic Congressional ballot—and they have trailed […]
Everyone loves labels. Italian Renaissance, French Baroque, Classical Greek—such little conveniences help us understand and comprehend the often tangled and messy reality of artists and art movements, which, like any […]
New photographs in which Allen Ginsberg captured his fellow Beats—Kerouac, Corso, and himself—have been unearthed by scholars, enriching the American Beat catalog.
Are spies like us? Just watch this. And then, well ensconced in romance and nostalgia, consider that Ian Fleming said—or did he write?—that “men want a woman whom they can […]
“[The painting is] one of the most powerful, horrible and yet fascinating pictures that has been painted anywhere in this century,” wrote the New York Tribune in 1879 of then […]
Portugal’s inferiority complex leads to a very curious comparison
Remarkably, Cuba leads the world (or at least those countries shown on this map) in the patients per doctor ratio.
Attention has been drawn once again to the US’ “don’t, ask don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuality in the armed forces after a lesbian solider was “outed” by police.
As advice columnists go, Emiy Yoffe of “Dear Prudence” is usually relatively compassionate. Today, however, Prudie was shockingly cruel to a young woman* grieving the loss of her best friend: […]
Following Pope Benedict’s late August seminar on evolution, the consensus view from Science magazine and intelligent design watchdogs appeared to be that the Vatican was not yet ready to endorse […]
I watched TV last night with a buddy of mine whose wife is out of town. That means we got to drink beers and curse at the people on TV […]
Opening my daily Treehugger news email just now, I noticed that headline: ‘Dinner in the Dumpster’. Oh, I thought, how fun! An article about freeganism! In fact, the article at […]
You can debate the validity of these metrics endlessly. You can question whether citations and pubs are the best indicators of university quality and impact, and you can deliberate over […]
n n (click on the image for a larger version) n ‘Everybody Is Against Everybody – Somebody Has To Be For Them’: the message behind this Amnesty International poster is […]
Octopus and hidden cameras go together like chocolate and peanut butter. You never know what those crazy cephalopods will get up to. Today, Boing Boing dug up some neat old […]
Chances are, you don’t know where Manning, South Carolina is. Chances are, you’ve never heard of this small southern town. I only know where it is because it was the […]
In the Matrix trilogy, God is portrayed as a software Architect. The fact that the first movie was released in 1999 is appropriate since software code had begun to exert […]
In this month’s issue of Nature Biotechnology, I join with other authors to suggest several bold new initiatives in science communication and journalism. The Commentary article includes an overview of […]
The map on the bedroom wall of every teenage Bilderberger
In a recent article in The Australian, Matthew Westwood writes about Canadian social scientist Sarah Thornton, whose book Seven Days in the Art World (cover above) “explores the dynamics of […]
Legal scholar Laurence Tribe told Big Think today that he found Elena Kagan’s performance in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings to be “masterful in every respect.” Kagan, who was previously the […]
Gone are the days when crossing a border in Europe almost always meant having to change currencies. Converting guilders into Deutschmark, francs to pesetas, or whatsits into whatnots — all […]
I think Elena Kagan will be an outstanding Justice, not just because of her outstanding (and underrated) technical abilities—as I’ll mention shortly, I think the Court as a group is […]
This semester in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that Americans are using the Internet to alter the nature […]
This fall in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter […]
When Bill Frisell was young, he says remembers watching the “Mickey Mouse Club” on his family’s new television. “The leader of the Mouseketeers was this guy named Jimmy and he’d […]
Michael Moore is in a class by himself when it comes to generating news attention, advance publicity, and box office for his documentary films. For example, when I was in […]
Previously, I’ve noted the major hole that the IPCC digs itself by releasing its consensus reports on Fridays, only to be lost in the weekend news cycle. Back in February, […]