February 2012
17 posts
Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th... →
Columbia Historian Claudia Bushman on Mitt Romney,... →
If It Looks Like a Compliment, and Sounds Like a... →
Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on... →
But the reality of life here is that Mr. Gulbranson and many of his neighbors continue to take as much help from the government as they can get. When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed here hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears. It is much easier to promise future restraint than to deny present needs.
A Peaceful, But Very Interesting Pursuit →
The Symphony of Self →
As we awaken from sleep, our consciousness undergoes a radical transformation composed of dramatic adjustments in neural processes. Some neural circuits go quiet while others come online. The entire orchestration of the symphony of mind unfolds like changes in a music score, and while there is no single, master conductor, Damasio posits that the decentralized process does have hot spots of...
The Contraception Fight →
If the audience is paying attention, for example, it will notice that Republicans are not proposing to allow employers and plans to refuse to cover blood transfusions if they conscientiously object to them (although there are religious groups that do). Or vaccinations (although there are individuals who conscientiously object to those as well). Or medicines derived from animal experimentation....
Oldest Human Paintings Made by Neanderthals? →
The Scale of the Universe →
The Lessons of Steve Jobs →
Four is hardly a trend but it is interesting that the death and biography of the greatest businessman of our generation — someone who was responsible for so many world-changing products and ideas, who shaped our world through sheer force of will & imagination, etc. etc. — is inspiring some people to turn away from the lifestyle & choices that made Jobs so successful &...
Do Manufacturers Need Special Treatment? →
Tribalism in the Arabian Peninsula: It's a Family... →
Beyond the Sacred →
In recent decades, faith has, in other words, transformed itself into the religious wing of identity politics. Religion has, ironically, become secularised, driven less by a search for piety and holiness than for identity and belongingness. The rise of identity politics has transformed the meaning not just of religion but of blasphemy too. Blasphemy used to be regarded as a sin against God....
Nice Things to Say About Attila the Hun →
January 2012
25 posts
Report from Camelot →
Man, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich would be the coolest grandma EVER.
The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125... →
The First Woman to Go 'Round the World Did It As a... →
The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet... →
“It’s never a good idea to organize society in a way that depletes the energy of half the population. We discovered this with women decades ago, and now it’s time to realize it with introverts.”
The Devil's Trumpet →
“Even if people like Suzy Witten are right, it doesn’t tell you anything significant. That’s because the most important thing about the fits was what the people said they saw in their fits. Not the fact of the fits themselves. Whatever they might have ingested, if they ingested anything, doesn’t determine what they saw in their fits. And, you see, what they say they saw in their fits are the...
Janet Stephens: Intrepid Hairdressing... →
One of the cooler things I’ve read in awhile.
WatchGrim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak, Part 2
WatchGrim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak, Part 1
Why Does Our Universe Have Three Dimensions? →
In Which I Fix My Girlfriend's Grandparents' WiFi... →
But then one gray morning did Internet Explorer 6 no longer load The Google. Refresh was clicked, again and again, but still did Internet Explorer 6 not load The Google. Perhaps The Google was broken, the people thought, but then The Yahoo too did not load. Nor did Hotmail. Nor USAToday.com. The land was thrown into panic. Internet Explorer 6 was minimized then maximized. The Compaq Presario was...
Good King John →
How Mormons See the World →
Glad I’m not the only one who heartily dislikes “the world” rhetoric.
The Four Stages of Introducing New Technologies →
Stage 1: “It will kill us all!!”
Friends and Strangers: A Meditation on Money →
The economists tell us a neat story about the development of money. The primitive world, they tell us, begins in barter, develops in money, and matures in credit systems. The problem however, is that the historians and the anthropologists have been telling the economists, and telling them for over 100 years, that they can find no record of this development; in fact, the actual history seems to...
What Civilization Means →
Our Selves, Other Cells →
During pregnancy, cells sneak across the placenta in both directions. The fetus’s cells enter his mother, and the mother’s cells enter the fetus. A baby’s cells are detectable in his mother’s bloodstream as early as four weeks after conception, and a mother’s cells are detectable in her fetus by week 13. In the first trimester, one out of every fifty thousand cells in her body are from her...
Don't Let the Economy Pick Your Major For You →
All They That Labored →
You Say You Want a Devolution? →
Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel...
The 600-Year Struggle for the Soul of Joan of Arc →
Believe It Or Not →
From small differences in the four Gospels, they drew big conclusions. Matthew speaks of a lamp giving light to “all those in the house”; Luke speaks of a lamp to guide “those coming into the house”. For Martin Dibelius, a German scholar, that was one clue—among many—that the material collected by Matthew was prepared for a Hebrew public, who were in a sense already illuminated; Luke’s words...
If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight →
Herman Melville “Call me Bella.” A tome about the length of the original series investigates Bella’s monomanical search for the vampire who stole her virginity. There’s an entire chapter devoted to describing the devastating whiteness of Edward’s skin, and several on the physiognomy of vampires, starting with their skeletal structure outward.
December 2011
32 posts
Ancient Texts Tell Tales of War, Towers... and Bar... →
Among the finds is a haunting, albeit partly lost, inscription in the words of King Nebuchadnezzar II, a ruler of Babylon who built a great ziggurat — massive pyramidlike towers built in ancient Mesopotamia — dedicated to the god Marduk about 2,500 years ago.
The inscription was carved onto a stele, a stone slab used for engraving. It includes a drawing of the ziggurat and King Nebuchadnezzar...
Ruins in Georgia Mountains Show Evidence of Maya... →
Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of... →
After twenty years of sending academically gifted but untrained college graduates into the nation’s toughest schools, the evidence regarding TFA corps member effectiveness is in, and it is decidedly mixed. Professors of education Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez, in the most thorough survey of such research yet, found that TFA corps members tend to perform equal to teachers in similar...
Panama's Nata Chiefs →
Tyler Cowen on Stories →
One interesting thing about cognitive biases - they’re the subject of so many books these days. There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and...
How Luther Went Viral →
Bashar al-Assad Is Every Bit His Father's Son →
Is Work Still Meaningful? →
On its face, “meaningful work” may sound elitist, an offshoot of late 20th century “professionalism” that encouraged the privileged few to “express themselves” through their jobs. And historically, the widespread demand for meaningful jobs is new, a consequence of developments stretching back barely a generation. But the decline of manufacturing and the rise...