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Debunking The Logic In Favor Of PaywallsKristin Hersh Turns An Album Into A BookJury Dumps Patent Used To Sue FacebookDon't Read Too Much Into The Claims That Intellectual Ventures Returns Are NegativeWhite House Seeks Easier FBI Access To Internet Records, Blocks Oversight Attempt... Just As FBI Caught Cheating On Exam To Stop AbuseUK Gov't Review Says Google WiFi Sniffing Didn't Sniff Anything SignificantForging Science: The Story Of How Famed Painting Authenticator Likely Duped The Art WorldComcast Cares: Pay Us The $0.00 You Owe, Or We Cut You OffSoftware Firms Overwhelmingly Against PatentsSecond Lawsuit Over School Webcams Involves Student Who Was Photographed 469 Times Over 2 MonthsPerfect 10 Loses Again, As Court Says DMCA Notices Need To Be Properly FiledOld Spice Man Gets Backed Up With A Few Numbers, Sales Up 107 PercentMichael Jackson's Estate Complains About Dancing MJ Zombie In GameLawyer For Mother Accused Of Killing Baby, Threatens Separate Lawsuit Over People Copying His Facebook PhotosBarney Frank's Attempt To Allow & Tax Online Gambling Moves Forward (Again)Colbert Helps Save World From Polka PiratesYes, People Can Comment On Content Business Models Without Having Produced Hit ContentWikileaks Afghan War Document Leak Again Raises Questions: Treason Or Whistleblowing?Can Man Who Found Long Lost Ansel Adams Glass Negatives Sell Prints?Dear Warner Bros., It's Not 'Word Of Mouth' If You Have To Pay People To Promote Your Movies

Alternet

Start a Petition Lost Billions in Iraq Fun Fact: It’s a Crime to Lie to a Federal Official (but They Can Lie to You!) Disgusting: Right-Wing Group Launches ‘Anti-Islamic’ Bus Ads in Major Cities Hilarious Video: Vote for Basil Marceaux for Governor of Tennessee! Judge Weakens SB 1070, Puts on Hold Law’s Punching Effects Aimed to Immigrants in Arizona Time Magazine Exploits Afghan Girl Who Had Her Nose Cut off to Defend OccupationMORE Lady Gaga: Pop Star for the End of America Cutting Corners in Ocean Protection Beltway liberalism in 24 words “Inception” in Afghanistan So the Rebublicans were being Fiscally Responsible voting against Unemployment Extensions/Really Trickle Down Economics does’nt work says Alan Blinder. Here’s what does.MORE Michael Pollan: The Mighty Rise of the Food RevolutionDems Take on Supreme Court's Giant Sell-Out of Our Democracy to CorporationsDocumentary Reveals the Price Paid in Blood for the Senseless War in AfghanistanThe American Dream, the Harms of Porn, the Inner Mind: A New Source of Popular Articles for AlterNet ReadersWashington, D.C. April 10, 2006Judge's Ruling Against AZ's Immigration Law Didn't Fix the Problem -- We Need a Fundamental Shift from ObamaDRUGSWatch: What a Legal Pot Economy Would Look LikeECONOMY4 Bogus Attacks Bankers and Their Political Puppets Are Using to Attack Elizabeth WarrenMEDIA AND CULTUREFox News and the Teabaggers' Absurd Whining About "Reverse-Racism" is a Ploy of Mass DistractionSEX & RELATIONSHIPS5 Ridiculous Myths About SexWORLDAre Nations Going Extinct?INVESTIGATIONSHas the Most Common Marijuana Test Resulted in Tens of Thousands of Wrongful Convictions?Free 3D Business Men Marching ConceptECONOMYCorporate Profits Return, But There's Nearly Zero Hiring WORLDA US Army soldier walks through a cell block at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba, in 2004. A US federal judge has ruled that a Mauritanian accused of links to the 9/11 attacks should be released from the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the court said Tuesday.American Soldiers Brainwashed with "Positive Thinking"MEDIA AND CULTUREGlenn Beck's Incendiary Rhetoric Is Dangerously Close to Having a Body CountECONOMYIs Wall Street Making Life or Death Decisions on Your Behalf? TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHTHow Racist Anti-Immigrant Groups Are Trying to Recruit EnvironmentalistsECONOMYLabor Takes on the Money Power of Hotel Chains Across 15 Cities This undated picture released by the Republic of Korea Navy shows a Pohang class Patrol Combat Corvette PCC-772 Chonan. A South Korean navy ship with 104 people on board sank near the North Korean border Friday after an unexplained explosion, military officials said, and a news report said several sailors were killed.WORLDU.S.-China Super-Power Collision Looming in South China SeaUS Army Sergeant Dostal adjusts the scope of his sniper rifle as he scans for enemy activities during a mission to the nearby village of Laui Kalay in the Korengal Valley, eastern Afghanistan in 2009. The top US commander in Afghanistan defended Friday his decision to pull forces out of the notorious Korengal Valley, despite Taliban commanders claiming victory there.WORLDWikiLeaks Bombshell Docs Paint Afghan War as Utter Disaster -- Will We Finally Stop Throwing Money and Lives at This Catastrophe?PERSONAL HEALTHCan Drugs Make Americans Lose Weight? Not LikelyMEDIA AND CULTURELady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in DeclineCIVIL LIBERTIES14 Shocking Facts That Prove the Criminal Justice System Is RacistENVIRONMENT"Fracking" Poisons Your Drinking Water: Stand Up to the Oil Giants and Help Stop the CatastropheDRUGSObama Wants a Bush Crony Appointed as a Top Drug Enforcer -- Reformers Push Hard to Change His Mind TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHTRight-Wing Crazies Who Fight Witchcraft and Demons Are Taking Over a State Near You TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHTFighting Back Against the Dangerous Lies Spewed by Right-Wing Propagandist Andrew Breitbart More Top Headlines Obama tour aims to tout Motor City success storyUS lawmakers urge probe of China Ansteel's dealUS growth expected to slow amid looming stagnationLockerbie investigators may travel to Britain: US SenatorDems Call On GOPers To Renounce Phyllis Schlafly Over Remarks About 'Unmarried Women' (AUDIO)Bashing immigrants isn't good for Arizona's economyKindergarten: A Lasting LegacyA changing political landscape for health care reformMORE5 Stupid, Unfair and Sexist Things Expected of MenHas the Most Common Marijuana Test Resulted in Tens of Thousands of Wrongful Convictions?America, There Is a Better Way: It’s Called GermanyWhy Does God Reveal Himself to Some People and Not to Others?Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in DeclineBP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents StruggleRight-Wing Crazies Who Fight Witchcraft and Demons Are Taking Over a State Near YouHow You Will Change the World with Social Networking14 Shocking Facts That Prove the Criminal Justice System Is RacistWikiLeaks Bombshell Docs Paint Afghan War as Utter Disaster -- Will We Finally Stop Throwing Money and Lives at This Catastrophe?America, There Is a Better Way: It’s Called GermanyMichael Pollan: The Mighty Rise of the Food Revolution5 Stupid, Unfair and Sexist Things Expected of MenSen. Bernie Sanders: Fight Back Against the OligarchyHas the Most Common Marijuana Test Resulted in Tens of Thousands of Wrongful Convictions?14 Shocking Facts That Prove the Criminal Justice System Is Racist80% of Post-Traumatic Stress Sufferers Lost Symptoms After Taking Ecstasy -- Study's ResultsBP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents StruggleWhy Does God Reveal Himself to Some People and Not to Others?Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in DeclineMore Most Emailed Stories More Most Discussed Stories 

Google World

Wikileaks Afghanistan: Taliban 'hunting down informants' - Telegraph.co.uk'Abbas to give negotiations green light by September' - YnetnewsVisa issues upset UK-India partnership hopes - The GuardianBaby killings shock France - Aljazeera.netN.Korea holds more talks with US military - AFPPakistan Boost Rescue Effort After Flash Floods Kill 275, Destroys Homes - BloombergViolence targeting Iraqi military kills at least 21 - CNNHow the CIA Got It Wrong on Iran's Nukes - Wall Street JournalLebanon hosts rare Arab leader summit - AFPKarzai attacks 'shocking' leak of files - Financial Times

Wiki News

French woman admits to killing her eight infantsUp to 140 feared dead as boat sinks in DR CongoC-17 crashes near air force base in AlaskaApple releases new Magic Trackpad, updated iMacs and Mac ProsFormer USDA employee Shirley Sherrod to sue blogger Andrew BreitbartGibraltar police investigate suspicious deathOldest user of Twitter, Ivy Bean, dies at 104Loneliness unhealthy as smoking and alcoholism, new study saysAhmadinejad criticizes Paul the octopusSix killed in Sadr City bombingTennessee Lieutenant Governor suggests that Islam is a 'cult'Bull fighting banned in CataloniaSevere smog blankets MoscowPlane crash in Pakistani capital kills 152Wyclef Jean considering standing for president of Haiti

Amazons Latest

Stuff International

Up to 6600 graves mixed upLondon's bicycle fleet unveiledKiller grizzlies capturedMonarchy mania gets king's ransomMeet the man with a new faceWikiLeaks' action may cost livesBody of second US soldier foundExplosion in BangkokGame Junkie - Gerard Campbell's gaming blogThe Girls' Guide: Jane Yee on life at 30ishConnector - Luke Appleby on technologyLosing It: Rachel Goodchild lets the weight go for goodStuff on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

Stuff

Quizzes »Newspapers »iPad »Jennifer Lopez for Idol?Top Model host expects big thingsBiggest office distractionsQuiz: Stuff's daily trivia challengeGame review: Review: Florence and the MachineBlog: Beautiful tabby photosDrag to reposition News Boxes.Weather home

Boing Boing

The 100 best magazine articles everGirls Like Boys With Skills - new song from Rocky and BallsBurmese protesters using "Team America" likeness of Kim Jong-Il on postersWikileaks source suspect Manning transferred from Kuwait to Quantico, VAReport: Army admonished Manning for YouTube uploads referencing classified facilitiesGoogle computer and Western media report China outage, actual humans in China beg to differDIY Kitty Crack: ultra-potent catnip extractWhen 2 dinosaurs become 1Kite-flying in a thunderstorm leads to pseudo-telekinesis3D-printed clothingMaggie speaking in Albuquerque Aug. 16Win free tickets to Outside Lands 2010!Moresukine -- a comic book about a German cartoonist's experiences in TokyoTokyo's oldest man actually dead for 30 yearsHaircuts and PopsiclesRefutation of a children's bookHallucinogen to be tested as cure for opiate addictionMAKE Volume 23 is on newsstands!Hard Russian hardwareGlenn Beck's website gives him something to cry aboutCartoon about prohibition: The FlowerManning linked to classified Afghanistan reportsHow to clone vinyl recordsWhite House wants easier access for FBI to internet activity logsBitten by a radioactive Carl Sagan White House shifts criticism of Wikileaks to focus on "naming of individual" AfghansReport: Google, CIA investing in "Future of Web Monitoring"YouTube to increase upload limit from 10 to 15 minutesMusic video created with Nintendo DSiGet Lamp now available

The Register

Google site fools interwebs into China blockage scare'Suspicious' Android wallpaper app nabs user dataData for 100m Facebook accounts published to BitTorrentUncle Sam sues Oracle (again) for alleged fraudBallmer and Softies sacrifice sleep to catch iPadNvidia plugs-in Visual Studio with CUDA 3.1Fog of cyberwar: internet always favors the offenseMicrosoft names September for IE9 betaNext Gnome delayed until 2011Open source HPC file system gets startupUS carrier tailors 3G jacket for iPod touch?Lovefilm calls in the DRM brigade for media player pushOracle and HP make a deal for Solaris on ProLiantsIBM buys file compressorApple coughs to iPhone 3G IOS 4 upgrade problemsNokia goes after Opera MiniSky clocks up £1bn profitQuantum quivers againPay-off or lay-off: HP calls on 700 staff to heed redundo plea.NET for Android prepares to get probedFragrant tech thief stalks WhitehallCourts bar dodgy documents from divorce casesVirgin hitches MTV to media player lovelinessAcer Aspire Ethos 8943G 18.4in laptopGoogle sets Android on piratesSky turns 3D on Oct 1Authentic Navy rum: Yours for £600 a bottleData breaches blamed on organised crimeUK privacy watchdog clears Google Wi-Fi slurpiPads for hospitals: is this a good idea?Papal crackdown on bare-kneed tourists sparks hypocrisy claimsID card astroturf - No2ID beats the truth out of IPSSupercomputer geek builds Cray-1 around home PCDfT 'unwittingly' bigged-up speed camera benefitsUK population to be guaranteed mobile 768Kb/sec serviceOpposition to can Aus $1.3bn school laptops programTurkish pranksters load Facebook Translate with swearsBT layoffs boost profitsManaging change in the application portfolioChurchill's dentures go under the hammerSage poised for huge Italian buyRussian city blocks YouTubeAmazon takes Kindle to the UKCell phone eavesdropping enters script-kiddie phaseAlcatel OT-808 fashion phoneNoScript 2.0 beefs border patrolArmed with exploits, ATM hacker hits the jackpotPurdue puts HPC cluster in HP PODsCitrix fluffed by XenDesktop virt in Q2Lonely boffins share <em>Inception</em>-style dreams

Fark

Minnesota, land of 10,000 leaksNot news: white male robbing a bank. Fark: The stigma of now going thru the rest of your life known as "the button-down-shirt" banditOne thing the leaked military reports show occuring over and over: Afghanistan security personnel spend more time beating the crap out of each other than the TalibanPreacher wants high-school mascot changed because he doesn't want his son screaming GO DEMONS at football gamesGreat news, West Virginia farkers - your state just decided the first DUI doesn't really countYes, I can help you recover your nude photos from your computerFather of the year candidate stops to snap pictures before taking daughter to the hospital after she is bitten by a barracuda. With pic that says it allToday's teacher/student sex story is brought to you by Stockton, California, complete with "only if it's 1:59am" pic500 foot billboards are coming to MiamiNPR strikes to the heart of their target audience by exposing the dark world of people who use an alias at StarbucksPhotoshop this devilish watercross racerHeadline: Police Say Man Took Up-Skirt Photos At Target. Sounds like he got a bullseye. (w/ derp perp pic)Teens smoking legal, synthetic version of pot. It doesn't get you high and it costs $20 a gram, reminding us all that teenagers are stupid, stupid people"He told police he had gone out to the trampoline and had masturbated himself there"YouTube decreases the number of parts a pirated sitcom needs to broken into from three to twoJapanese officials visit the home of Tokyo's oldest man to honor his 111th birthday, and then things get weirdWhat happens when you mix sci-fi with burlesque? Full-frontal nerdityAmy Fisher, AKA The Long Island Lolita, signs a deal to get shot in the faceThe police are flush with charges for a man found sleeping in a toiletObama stops by "The View," has no clue what a "Snooki" isStepping on an IED leaves marine: a) dead b) seriously wounded c) pissed offBoston Police have begun their three-month dedication to slowing youth violence by: c) Converting a cruiser into an ice cream truck and handing out thousands of free Hoodies. That'll learn 'em1500 years later, Rome still suffers at the hands of vandals. That really Gauls meDid Juneau that a cruise ship struck and killed a whale?Infants who get plenty of affection from their mothers cope better as adults, complain researchers who were neglected as kidsFor a website devoted to transparency, WikiLeaks itself is on par with North Korea when it comes to functional transparency"Indiana Jones of Torah Scribes" must stop fabricating dramatic stories about rescued Torahs unless he can prove they are kosher. What's next? Jailing grandpa because he didn't really walk to school uphill in a blizzard?Criticized for a profanity-laden e-mail showing it was screwing its customers, Goldman Sachs decides to ... ban swearing in e-mailsPhotoshop this snatched snackBeer saves another life as guy keeps his drunken promise to donate bone marrow to a friendLocal pastor, who is definitely not gay, is upset about "pornographic" men's underwear packaging. Again, not gayGlobal warming "undeniable" say scientists who have clearly never read FarkThe U.S. has never apologized for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we're not going to this year eitherIn an interview with William Shatner, the Beltway Sniper confesses more killings. Wait. What?Schadenfreude (n) : The feeling you get when you see a picture of two $2.3m cars with wheel clamps onWomen cops get treated to an appearance of the ball-grabbing Bull Cop -- hilarity ensues, followed by payouts of 3/4 of a million in gender bias lawsuit settlementsPay attention, butthurt teabaggery right-wing palinbots mad at the Mooslimosque at Ground Zero: know what's right around the bend from the Pearl Harbor memorial? A Shinto shrineTo the driver who left his or her car running underneath the Throgs Neck Bridge just before the start of rush hour, a few thousand angry New Yorkers would like to have a few unkind words with youPeople, seriously, stop pretending your dog is a personRussian PM signs bill giving new powers to the the FSB, including the power to punish crimes you haven't committed yetA list of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's more notable dislikes. Photoshop learning curve suspiciously absentBritish sex clinic to stay open longer, harderMassive oil spill threatens to be a "tragedy of historic proportions." This is not a repeat from BPPeople begin to drop their guard, unload their rifles, and unseal their panic rooms as the death panel Gestapo has failed to haul away GrandmaWindows-based ATM hack gives cash on demandFirst evidence of a parallel universe found as study shows that libraries lend more DVDs every day day than Netflix rents to its subscribers"I poured it in the toilet and it started to fizz." Story about assassination attempt in Afghanistan, not Lindsey Lohan's drug testsThis is sure to be even funnier after you miss your connecting flight because airport security detained you for a few extra hoursOusted USDA employee Sherrod plans to sue that cracker BreitbartIPhone 4's FaceTime video chat gains traction because of: a). Girlfriends showing off new haircuts. b). Deployed soldiers looking at ultrasounds of their unborn children. c). PornEternal salvation can be yours for just $39Monogamy isn't natural, says the psychologist whose wife is about to find out about his affairJudge rules that the Founding Fathers wanted you to have the right to look like a dumbass wearing baggy pants that hang halfway down your legsStealing a vechicle is one thing. Listing it on Craigslist and letting the owner spot their stolen vehicle is not too brightObama wants FBI to be able to get individual's internet usage data without a warrant. That must have been what he meant by transparencySt. Albert Minor Baseball Association says city overreacted to its tradition of setting baseball diamonds on fire"Missing California woman reportedly seen in Las Vegas" Apparently, however, neither CNN, the Las Vegas PD nor the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office can contribute a photo. So be sure to be on the lookout for herPeach flavored placenta, plus seven other disturbing inventions from Japan. (slightly Not safe for work)Suspicious device found in Chelsea. Guess she couldn't wait for the weddingWhen forging a check, it's best to pick an amount that will fit through a teller's windowSouth Korean Prime Minister offers to resign... again. Presumably to give speeches on the lucrative Tea Party circuitPortland doing its best to control child sex trafficking with its two vice cops. Meanwhile the drug unit has 18 officers and 4 sergeants. You're doing it wrongIn a completely fair and balanced article, a prostitute explains that all men cheatNews: 100 million facebook users have their personal information hacked and put in a file. Fark: MSNBC posts the story, tells what site it's on and puts up a screenshot of the file description on the siteWil Wheaton is 38 in Earth years (he looks younger because of all that time traveling at light speed)"When fascism arrives in America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" Not to mention oblivious to sexual double entendres12-year-old girl survives shooting due to being shot in the GodYou talkin' to me? YOU TALKIN' TO ME?Disparity in sentencing between crack and coke fixed, the 1980s smile and nodPhotoshop this creature coming to get youStyrofoam packing peanuts are being replaced with mushrooms. Keep that in mind the next time you order a ten-foot tall purple bat-winged fire breathing llama from AmazonAll electric cars qualifying for California's $5000 rebate and permission to carry a single rider in an HOV lane please roll forward. Not so fast there, Chevy VoltFrom the well of over-tapped WWII heroism, here are the dentures that won the warRetirees - some as old as 90 - accused of playing loud music and having parties lasting into early hours of morningIt's Viagra. You know, for kids56-year-old woman becomes the slowest person to ever swim the English Channel. A WINNER IS YOUIf you put a flightless bird on a conveyor belt will it take off?Urban ninja mothers urge women to take back the streets. Your move, urban pirate mothersBeer laced with cheese helps sexual performance. Which explains how a small town like Green Bay can sell out a stadium for 50 years straightOne in five Californians say they need mental health care. That explains PelosiIf you're an overweight, middle-aged, balding man who keeps showing up in the background of reporters' live shots, the English news media is onto youGulf oil is disappearing on its own, Anderson Cooper will have to find somewhere else to wear his muscle shirts, Oh the humanityTheme of Farktography Contest No. 273: "Dirty Pictures." Note: Nothing sexual. Details and rules in first post. LGT next week's themePhotoshop a reason for these two to be doing what they are doing

Sci-tech Daily

Mind meld brain synchronization is the key to effective communication Head lice do not represent enough of a public health threat to keep children at home Cemetaries are providing hidden habitats for endangered plants and animals Many of the creatures that lived in the Ediacaran Period are so unlike modern forms that deciphering what they are and how they lived continues to challenge paleontologists It took millions of years for our hands to go from grasping tree limbs to writing poetry, and making stone tools helped propel that evolution Thousands of underground coal fires are burning on every continent except Antarctica Titan's lakes are evaporating, suggesting an active weather cycle on that moon If you want to deliver a knockout blow, go for lots of quick punches to produce as much concussion as you can Would you drive a rolling Styrofoam cooler even if it did give you 100 miles to the gallon? More education makes people better able to cope with changes in the brain associated with dementia Collecting and dealing in fossil relics of a prehistoric age is big business An oddball galaxy looks like it's been flipped twice by a collision with a smaller galaxy Maths shows us that we'll never be able to predict the wanderings of locusts A blind amphibious salamander seems to defy all predictions based on current theories of ageing Astronomers think Neptune was hit by a large comet two centuries ago Diagnosing early breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant A fly-on-the-wall look at an asteroid fly-by Empirical study upholds belief that women really are better multi-taskers, able to stand back and reflect while they are juggling other tasks Vaginal gel reduces risk of contracting the HIV virus by almost 40 per cent The Martian heat-ray will hit the streets as a non-lethal, directed-energy, counter-personnel weapon New tool takes some of the guesswork out of second try at IVF after a first-time failure Why would a penguin lay two eggs and boot the first one out of the nest? Athletes are getting into more and more mind games The conventional flu jab could be replaced by a skin patch applied by patients Now we know why the Australian, Nazca and Pacific tectonic plates move up to four times faster than the smaller African, Eurasian and Juan de Fuca plates Hooray, we've found something that will eat jellyfish Huge collapse in the thermosphere has atmospheric scientists puzzled There are a lot of practical benefits in teaching your baby sign language A space-based telescope has been blinded by the brightest explosion ever witnessed by humanity A limestone cave packed with fossils reveals the complete lifecycle of an ancient marsupial Lava tubes could form the basis of lunar or Martian settlement The ability to produce sperm is very ancient, probably originating at the dawn of animal evolution 600 million years ago An alien planet orbits so close to its star that its atmosphere is being blasted away, forming a gaseous, comet-like tail Some marriages thrive on blame and criticism Why not turn the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into a recycled island the size of Hawaii If it's not the spilt oil killing marine life in the Gulf, what is? The most common type of stroke can be completely prevented in rats by stimulating a single whisker -- so where's our magic spot? Speedy tectonic plate may warp or split Australia Acoustic fabric functions as both speaker and microphone Massive stars get their bulk from large-scale dust clouds The position of your belly button may indicate how fast you are on the track or in the pool Stem cell pharmacies that dispense tissue therapies could be in your local shopping precinct in 20 years' time Emotions spread through social networks like a tummy-bug through summer camp It is nearly impossible to take in a Robert McCall space painting and not feel that visceral yearning to conquer the last great frontier, even now Early oceanography was a heady blend of improvisation and experimentation Google Earth spots a new meteor crater (new, geologically speaking) Lego bricks go virtual in a multi-player online building empire Photoshopping PR images can lead to the wrong kind of PR, as BP is finding out A 4,000-year backward glance at the history of science proves insightful If you think it's OK to pour fat down the sink, take a look at what can result E O Wilson's autobiography Naturalist tells us of the great ant man's enchanted childhood and development into one of the patron saints of conservation New technologies as revolutionary as the printing press are changing the concept of a book and what it means to be literate Medical comics and graphic novels can be hilarious and harrowing Taking video games seriously is like taking television seriously -- it contorts the sensitive mind into paroxysms of pleasure and shame Explaining natural disasters doesn't really help our fear and awe of what we see Explore Mars in high-resolution 3D and who knows what you might find Can you be more than pretty in pink? Our new pleasures are linked to a fixed set of old ones based on primal needs There are extreme adventures and misadventures at the top of the world Becoming a furry superpower was a serious factor in the rise of the US The widespread impact of genome sequencing is only now beginning to be felt, and a new era of genetically informed medicine is just around the corner. Even in the freewheeling world of online blogging, there has to be a distinction between editorial and advertising [more] Scientists and composers have produced a new choral work in which performers sing parts of their own genetic code The onward march of time fundamentally derives from something peculiar about the way the universe was born Pedestrian promenades and bike-friendly suburbs fill the cities of 2030 in an exhibition of our urban future Can you really inspire interest in science, technology, engineering and maths by combining NASA moonbase info with a cutting-edge game engine? There was more to Jacques Cousteau than a fancy ship and a French accent From subject to citizen -- Thomas Jefferson's change of mind in drafting the Declaration of Independence is revealed A doctor put together a preventative healthcare checklist with additional reading material for his mum, and spawned a book Take a journey that leads from laser-wielding urologists to ego-flaying Buddhists Our multiple mating evolutionary past continues to affect our relationships and our society today How do we learn to distinguish between experts who get it right and those who get it wrong? You can get some great photos when you have an active volcano and an aurora in your backyard Even a non-religious critique of Darwin can demonstrate flawed reasoning and unconvincing sidetracks There could be so much more to video games than playing Pacman or Call or Duty How did past generations who didnt have television or a camera depict dramatic moments in living geologic history? Now you can shift data around at the flick of a hand, like Tom Cruise in Minority Report Dodgy stem cell clinics sell hope, not science How could progressives who worked for conservation, national health insurance and the rights of workers adopt eugenics as the next bright idea? Few regions would lose out from geoengineering if they were willing to trade a large change in temperature for a smaller drop in precipitation The evidence of octopus intelligence doesnt show that we should treat them differently from other creatures, but nonetheless there remain some intriguing questions Widespread academic fraud in China could hamper its drive for innovation Bringing back samples from space is well worth the effort and expense Music should be celebrated (and studied) as a gymnasium for the mind; but ultimately its value lies with the way it enriches, socializes and humanizes us Australia's top health standards body has been accused of subverting food science to fit a green agenda Discovery certainly seems to be getting harder, but how much harder? Children's media and science education projects often seem a generation or two behind, consumed by today's children but made by yesterday's To infinity and beyond -- time travelling with Stephen Hawking Perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children Humans probably wont find intelligent aliens by eaves-dropping Susan Blackmore wonders if science can explain everything Will anything curb China's appetite for endangered species? How hard is it going to be for health food companies to come up with honesst slogans that are scientifically supported and aren't misleading? Environmentalism has always been the most existential of social movements, willing to shift tactics on the fly, use what works and discard what doesnt Is feeding kids more space and dinosaur stories an effective government science strategy? People who live in rural areas with high unemployment rates are less likely to support environmental regulations The campaign against homeopathy isnt some medical establishment conspiracy, but a public movement China's record on issues of organ harvesting and donation is pitted with deception and empty promises If readers don't pay enough attention to understand the nuances of complex science, is there any point in attempting to report science to non-experts? Can asking what is it like to be a foetus, help us with the dilemma of abortion? If you can't ban homeopathic products from pharmacies, how about putting them on shelves labelled "placebos" Hierarchy matters, whether you're a stroppy soccer team or an insubordinate general Is there any place for self-reported results in science? Shoot me now -- firing squads are a better means of execution than lethal injection Forget man-made threats -- the catalyst for the apocalypse will come from outer space What can science tell us about the Gulf oil spill and where it will get to? Going to Mars will be a complex enough and spectacular enough challenge that it will help restore a sense of wonder and a sense of "can do" A road across the Serengeti could kill the wildebeest migration and a whole lot more Population growth remains a disaster in slow motion that nobody sees Maybe the explanation of the universe lies beyond our ability to comprehend it Recognizing that error is an inevitable part of our lives frees us from despising ourselves Who owns the rights to the access of the human body and why can it be patented? Can we get enouigh cooperation to break two decades of deadlock in whale conservation measures? What constitutes adequate informed consent for biospecimens collected for research to be stored and used in future, possibly unrelated studies? The full effects of the Gulf oil spill will hit long after the cleanup efforts are finished, the beaches no longer smell of petroleum and the hazy sheen of oil is gone What should we do about the lost prestige of nuclear physics? The shift from a hunter-gathering lifestyle to an agricultural way of life has had dire consequences for humanity The harm of missing a chance to help often greatly exceeds the harm of prescribing drugs under a false pretext Can a serious injury to one child unsettle the whole family, changing behaviour patterns in a way that puts all the children at increased risk? More moves are afoot to convince city kids to get out and get dirty It's hard to find an ethically acceptable application for mental manipulation

Delicious

Deciphering Magic Methods in PHP | Nettuts+speaker seeker diva - Fic: Praise The Lord (And Pass The Ammunition) Masterpostさあ、iDishのある生活をはじめよう。 - しーなねこの記録Webプログラミングは何故オブジェクト指向でない？～WicketはWebプログラミングにオブジェクト指向を取り戻す: プログラマの思索17 Best Websites For Finding Web / Graphic Design JobsLawn Mower WheelsWhat research has to say for practice - ALT_Wiki50 Amazing CSS3 Image Galleries, Sliders, Animations » DJDESIGNERLAB – Find All Your Design Inspirations From This LaboratoryA Beginner’s Guide To Website Copywriting | Tips20 Fantastic Content Ideas For Your Online Community - FeverBee - The Online Community GuideAndy's Most Useful KnotsMediaElement.js - HTML5 video player in CSS with Flash and Silverlight fallbacksSexy Articles, Sex News, Hot Videos, Celebrity Gossip, Lifestyles, Funny Videos, and Dating Advice15 Free HTML5-CSS3 Templates to Start the Future of Web Design | blogfreakz.comPhotoshop Vip » 背景デザインに使える継ぎ目のないパターン素材、500枚あつめました。

Ars Technica

"Animal connection" helps separate humans from other speciesSprint set to release 3G-enabling "case" for iPod touchCongress ponders privacy of your underwear, immortal soulFeature: WiFi "Hole196": major exploit or much ado about little?Internet Explorer 9 beta to arrive in SeptemberMagic Trackpad or tragic Mac pad? A reviewBridging the gap between biomass and petrochemicalsStarCraft 2 is a full game, no matter what whiners sayGoogle in the clear over UK WiFi snoopingWindows 7 trounces Windows XP at green computingMozilla's Tab Candy is the first step to sweeter browsingApple looking into slow iOS 4 performance on iPhone 3GResearcher demonstrates ATM "jackpotting" at Black Hat ConferencePTex 3D texturing becomes a reality at SIGGRAPH Limbo's ending: what does it all mean? The many theoriesAmazon rolls out smaller, lighter, WiFi-only Kindle for $139Extension performance vastly improved in Safari 5.0.1Do Not Call list tops 200 million, some scammers still ignore itMicrosoft argues for "neighborhood watch" approach to security"Leaked" data of 100M Facebook users came from public infoJudge: Facebook comments were "puerile," but not defamationA peek inside the "secret, backroom" net neutrality meetingsNVIDIA launches new Fermi-based Quadros Just two Chinese ISPs serve 20% of world broadband usersOverkill as art: Ars reviews the Cyborg R.A.T. 7

Techmeme

Ballmer says Microsoft at work to rival iPadGoogle: The search party is overIn April, Apple Ditched Google And Skyhook In Favor Of Its Own Location DatabasesSources: Spotify Reboots U.S. Label NegotiationsGoogle Confirms: We're Not Currently Blocked In ChinaFor Apple Followers, It's a Matter of Faith, Academics SayY Combinator's Paul Graham: Say goodbye to traditional venture roundsUpload limit increases to 15 minutes for all usersHow to hide yourself from Google and cell phone carriersRain or Snow, Now You Can See Weather in Google EarthMicrosoft: We are focusing on eight core businessesEVO 4G's Android 2.2 update starts tricklingOracle Sued By U.S. Justice Department For Contract FraudGoogle Opens Places API With Initial Focus On Check-In AppsAdult industry sees iPorn potential in new phoneInternet Betting Gets Bigger as Online Gambling Companies MergeMicrosoft Internet Explorer 9 beta due in SeptemberMagic Trackpad TeardownIs Your HTML5 10K Apart?Blackberry Inventor Sees More Growth OpportunityYouTube Banned by a Far East CourtThe art of startup namesBizSpark Startup of the Day - protected-networks.comSeesmic Web - Now with Facebook and LinkedIn Support, Desktop notifications, and Faster than ever!Creating Navigation Structures in Silverlight (Silverlight TV #38)An Even Better Way to Find Places NearbyHadoop2010: Hadoop Frameworks PanelHow to Be More App Than Application: Tips for AppUp Development

Arts and Letters Daily

Belgium is a shotgun marriage of Dutch speakers in Flanders and French speakers in Wallonia. Maybe its time for the divorce... Frankly, we still give a damn about a movie that has just turned seventy. Adjust for inflation, and its box office is the most spectacular in film history... Before the Bauhaus, modernism was a volatile, centrifugal affair: Cubist, Futurist, Constructivist. After the Bauhaus, it gained a coherent focus... Its the holiday season again, and time for cheerful women and their men to go out shopping together. Usually a big mistake, and Darwin tells us why... Sovietology was a powerful force in Cold War history, giving the West a better understanding of its adversary. Today, we need a jihadology... Faux friendship. Were all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom wed rather have a beer with... In the 1980s and 90s, both Russia and China opened farming to private profit. For China, it turned out well, for Russia, not. Therein lies a story... Why is December 25th Christmas? If Jesus had been conceived on the same date he died, and born nine months later... Attacks by critics left poet John Keats much more uncertain and deeply wounded than his admirers then, or even now, have been willing to admit... As Twilight shows, not all that girls like is good art or good feminism. But the backlash against Twilight should matter to feminists, even as they shudder... Jean Sibelius lived through difficult and politically ambiguous times in WWII Finland. But did he have more to do with the Nazis than wed expect?... With all the hijacking off Somalia, how can pirates finance new ventures? And what do they do with their profits? They need a pirate stock exchange... Geoff Smith has invented a piano with a kind of micro-tuning that can make it useful for playing Persian music or North Indian ragas... David Guttenfelder is chief photographer for the A.P. in Asia. He offers a close-up look at the lives of U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan... Because entry barriers are so low, the web is a medium for journalistic experiments, says Nicholas Lemann. But we still need big news organizations... Franklin D. Roosevelt, after falling victim to polio, was in the business of concealing his diseases from the public. So did he die of cancer?... With more grandmasters than China and many more per capita than Russia, let alone the rest of the world, Armenia is a chess superpower... Reality TV has not only helped to debase the networks, it has even trashed the time-honored art of bad acting. James Wolcott explains... The stereotype of the sports-playing, emotionally illiterate, sex-obsessed boy keeps being regurgitated. Time to rethink boyhood... Caster Semenya won the 800-metre title by nearly 2 seconds, cruising past the other runners like a machine. Then her problems began... Mikhail Khodorkovskys fate stands as a warning, not only to Russians, but to the West. Why is the Kremlin so afraid to see him set free?... Dogs do it, lions do it, even babies in the womb do it, and though weird theories abound, nobody really knows why we yawn... Lew Wallace, General in the Civil War, a man Billy the Kid wanted to kill, wrote a favorite 19th-century novel, made into a 20th-century movie: Ben-Hur... Should historic art be repatriated to its land of origin? Imagine the Renaissance without the spell of “looted” antiquities from Greece... Wherever they go, Michelin guides smile on restaurants that are fussily French. Can they adapt their exacting critical criteria to American fare?... Religion reduces corruption and acts to increase respect for law in ways that boost economic growth in societies where it is present... more ... Religion is blamed when it promotes such evils as persecution or warfare, but gets less attention when it patches up the moral fabric of society... Some of Shakespeares plays, in the view of Edward Albee, could do with a bit of a trim. Just dont suggest that to Albee about his own plays... Albert Einstein’s first trip to the U.S. in 1921 evoked a mass frenzy we associate with rock stars. He also split American Jewry down the middle... The instant a warm wave of Chinon red splashes over the taste buds followed by pink chunk of lamb just off the coals can never be replicated... Jane Austen was such a subtle reader of her characters’ manners, flaws, and virtues, yet was herself a mysterious presence, hard to imagine in the flesh... Should Martin Heideggers books be pulled from library philosophy shelves and placed in history of Nazism? For Emmanuel Faye, its a good idea... Max Weber and Talcott Parsons may just be social scientists in your mind. But they are enemies of the state in Tehran... California has over 5000 public servants whose state pensions exceed $100,000. For that lucky group, it is the Golden State. Meanwhile, in Texas... Livestock and poultry farms give out 500 million tons of manure yearly. Where does it all go? Ask Rick Dove, whose Cessna is equipped with cameras and a GPS device... Whacky tabloid headlines can be quite literally true but very misleading all the same. John Allen Paulos explains... Yamahas new electronic piano looks like a cheap and nasty baby grand, but delivers the sonic wallop of a nine-foot Steinway. Or so it says here... Having escaped from Germany in 1933, Hannah Arendt stayed for the rest of her life loyal to the philosophic tradition that had helped lead to Hitlerism... The secret of the Mona Lisas enigmatic smile is a matter of which cells in the retina pick up the image and how they channel it to the brain... Science may at last help us to answer the eternal political question: really now, are liberals smarter than conservatives?... From curator to benefactor to docent, the art museum is a natural home for women, young and old. Polly Frost provides a field guide... Muslims who see themselves as having mastered technology and the modern world are often people for whom creationism has the most appeal... Ayn Rand was proud, grouchy, vindictive, insulting, dismissive, and rash the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions... Was a golf ball ever sliced into potato chips? Well, says a skeptical Clive James, suppose a golf course lies near a potato field... Bobby Fischer was one of the worlds great chess geniuses. He was also, Martin Gardner explains, close to being a complete moron... If a portrait of George Washington based on Gilbert Stuart was painted by a Chinese artist in 1800, should it be in a museum of American art?... Even Richard Dawkins knows an English nostalgia for village life, including church. I never go ... but still, I have some nostalgia for evensong... Grape foam injected with walnut milk and covered in powdered Maytag blue cheese. Its the American food revolution... What do F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns tell us? For starters, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift turns out to be untrue... Moral in tooth and claw. Animals have rich social lives. Cooperation has shaped their evolution as much as competition... more ... more ... more ... There are many argumentative Indians, but very few who can hold your attention in quite the way Amartya Sen can... Let us now praise the cliché. It’s a form of speech that is concise, time-tested, and instantly familiar. What’s not to love?... Americans are becoming less nomadic, with aging, stay-at-home baby boomers wanting to be close to family, friends, clubs, and churches... No one has ever summed up the longing for the warmth of family life and a front porch more eloquently than Christopher Lasch when he wrote... How did overly enthusiastic homebuyers in the U.S. manage to sink the global economy? Time to step back and take a long, clear view... At Arts & Letters Daily we never endorse anything except our own T-shirts and coffee mugs. Were not up for an $11,000 FTC fine. But how about you?... For centuries Germans united around the tale of Hermann, the hero who defeated the Roman army. Does Germany dare go back to this founding national myth?... Poker combines Puritan values of self-control, diligence, and slow savings with a cowboy desire to get rich quick. How very American... For Chinas growing economic elite, life is sweet. For the dissidents and peasants of China, its quite a different story... Trying to decipher nonsense makes you smarter. At least for a while. So should John Cage be taught more in schools?... With trials, harassment, and other forms of thuggish intimidation, Russian authorities are striking out against trouble-making curators and artists... Who me? Strident? Richard Dawkins is a little incredulous. If some people dont like him, its only because he loves truth even more than he loves them... A nonalcoholic sequel to the Whiskey Rebellion is brewing and it is gaining adherents. You might call it the Fresca Rebellion... Rachmaninoff? Alfred Brendel says he wrote music for teenagers. He was a composer who knew his craft.... But for his time he was a reactionary... Ghost writers: posthumous books by Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace, and Ralph Ellison raise thorny questions about what the writers intended... The Asian tiger mosquito has traveled from its home in Southeast Asia to the ends of the earth, one of the world’s most invasive species... Michael Sandel grasps the risks of taking his Harvard justice course to TV. He might even end up challenging his own moral and political convictions... The kindest cut. Raymond Carver was one of Americas greatest writers. But was his razor-sharp style created by his editor, Gordon Lish?... Is yonder cloud not in the shape of a camel? Methinks tis a whale yes, very like a whale. So hath that painting the signature of Jackson Pollock?... more ... Why do we still need to read the novels of Charles Dickens? Because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are... Metaphors that we put in daily use are often viewed as mere ornaments of speech. In fact, metaphors are keys to the structure of thought... Ever notice how many fine writers are just terrible at giving speeches and interviews? You are not alone. Arthur Krystal proposes an explanation... Vasily Kandinskys aesthetic DNA lives on in the history of art right up to the present day. Peter Plagens shows how... Vladimir Nabokovs revisions matter. They are not mere blottings out, but a window into the greatness and humanity of an author... Our melting brains. From the pencil to the typewriter to the computer, every change in media has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing to save the old ways... Rural brain drain. Small town America is being hollowed out, losing talented young people while new farming transforms the land for those who stay... Why is music in particular nice to listen to, blessed with a gigantic industry, while there is no market for “easy listening” speech sounds?... Does reading absurdist literature make you smarter? How about Kafka? Beckett? Giraffe carpet cleaner, it seems that it does... When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, counterinsurgency theory was about as popular in American military circles as tank warfare is today. But things change... Saving China from its kitsch: Brian and Jeanee Linden want to restore a Yunnan village with an eye to historic authenticity. Theyll need a lot of luck... Muslim creationism, built on an idea of superior Islamic science, is becoming increasingly visible and confident... Norman Borlaug, architect of the Green Revolution that saved millions of lives, is dead... more ... The Minsky meltdown. One economist saw years before anyone else exactly what the financial system is going through right now: Hyman Minsky... Typos can be an annoyance for both book authors and readers. Now in the e-book future, we can alter and correct without end... The guards at Abu Ghraib, like the guards in the Stanford Prison experiment, were victims of place and time. Werent Cheney and Rice victims in the same way?... Libya isnt the most brutal regime in the world, but it remains a grotesque entity, the state as a protection racket... When buildings collapse or trains crash, special rescue teams can bring out trapped people often in a matter of minutes. This is an ancient calling... As things stand, no blow is low enough, if the president comes from the other side. Consider Obamas school speech... Arts & Letters Dailys Tran Huu Dung, visiting Giverny a few weeks ago, took a picture proving that Claude Monet was a photo-realist... Most of us know only one version of Little Red Riding Hood, the one we heard as a child. But there are dozens of versions of this fairy tale... Drugs will soon be on sale to improve everything from memory to our trust in others. David Edmonds describes the coming Age of Enhancement... Children everywhere stew in the same pot of family conflict, with local cultural seasonings added for flavor. But basic moral values remain similar... If we ever again experience a solar storm similar to the extreme event of September 2, 1859, damage may be staggering... more ... Googles book search has become a running scholarly joke, as Geoffrey Nunberg explains, with delicious examples. But its not beyond repair... Barack Obamas mother, S. Ann Dunham, did solid anthropological research on village economics in Indonesia. Her work is at last coming into print... Did the Trojan War really happen? If so, did it flare at the archeological site that some scholars call Troy? Skepticism is slowly giving way... Stieg Larssons serial killers and torture fanciers are capitalists in league with hideous fascist bikers and meth runners. Not just crime, its politics... English may well be one of the biggest, most imaginative and attractive languages on the planet, but people just wont leave it alone... With his health failing at the end, it is no surprise to discover Vladimir Nabokov was losing his writerly powers. For son Dmitri, there is no such excuse... Facial expressions do not communicate so much as enjoin us to imagine what it feels like to make the expression. Music is empathic in a similar way... Sofia Tolstoy was a woman of strength and spirit. She understood the high price she would pay to live next to one of the greatest writers in history... Van Gogh was fascinated by Japanese prints, loved nature, and was obsessed with portraiture, which he viewed as a crucial genre for modern artists... What might it mean to hate the Roman Empire with all your heart? Think yourself into the murderous soul of Mithradates, and maybe youll understand... Henry Fowler did not waffle: there are right ways and wrong ways to use words. A new edition of his classic guide takes us back to the original Fowlers... For collaborators, life in Vichy Paris was sweet. Even for the likes of Sartre, Camus, and Cocteau it was hardly unlivable... Charles II loved theater, music, women, hunting, tennis, and gambling and he gambled for a more tolerant England... Leonardos oeuvre was whittled down from some 90 paintings in the 19th century to the dozen or so accepted today. Plus that one in Kansas... Umberto Eco is fascinated with lists, lists of lists, and the infinite regress of adding up and counting down anything and everything. Etcetera, etcetera... When Rilke died of leukemia, he did not want to know the name of his disease. For him, all that was worth knowing was in his poems... Engrossing, energetic, and compelling, Van Goghs letters dramatize individual genius while throwing light on how the creative mind works... We live in the age of the memoir, a time of more narcissism overall, less concern for privacy, a strong interest in victimhood, and a therapeutic culture... A writer lives monkishly, coddling a loss, dead wife, whatever. Violent accidents, maybe a man is beheaded, plus B-movie dialogue. Its Paul Austers fiction... Before Facebook, few of us ever asked others to be their friends, nor did we count the number of friends we had as a status indicator... There are beautiful passages in Vladimir Nabokovs The Original of Laura, but they are few and scattered. This is a major book for specialists... Loyalty to your workers, customer care, and giving back to the community made Baton Rouges favorite department store, created by Jews who fled the Nazis... In 1807, a Broadwood square grand piano, no. 10651, was taken by canal from London north to Lancaster for a John Langshaw, organist. Therein lies a story... Françoise dAubigné: born in a prison to a murderer, was a child beggar, then later on governess to Louis XIVs children, and finally his mistress and wife... Friedrich Nietzsche cultivated the alien form of Dionysus on the soil of his native Pietism. In truth, he never overcame his childhood religion... He was a skeptic? Oh, spare us, puhleeze! Arthur Koestler was a man suckered by an endless line of political, intellectual, and paranormal con jobs... Malcolm Gladwells little cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry, and false dichotomies do annoy. But when he stops playing social scientist... Tuscany. Provence. Sigh! Last outposts of love, wisdom, healthy food, great wine, warm people, and the good life. Really now, what twaddle... Roland Barthes is still here. Like Cole Porter, he was the author of phrases and rhythms that for some of us will not go away until we do... The research of Bell Labs Jan Hendrik Schön was so hot that editors of Nature and Science competed to publish it. He was, of course, a fraud... The Peloponnesian War can be used to guide thinking about our own problems of peace and war, argues Donald Kagan. He might be right... Maybe its great, post-Eve Ensler, that we’re now so garrulous on the topic of vaginas. Kathleen Parker doesnt think so, and she is Americas most-read woman columnist... Events of 1989 are often depicted as a failure of socialism. Though this powerful view has served to discredit alternatives to capitalism, it remains in doubt... Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskys Memories of the Future enlarge our conception of the zeitgeist that promoted some of the 20th centurys most limpid deliriums... Dangerously delicious food, designed by Big Food and by restaurants to taste so good, threatens public health. Congress needs to do something... Wikipedia writer/editors are 80% male, 65% single, 85% without children, about 70% under the age of 30. Does that tell us anything?... John Maynard Keynes offers us today not so much a well-defined economic doctrine as the attitude and the tools with which he attacked economic problems... From the Salem witch trials to W.E.B. Du Bois to Linda Lovelace, A New Literary History of America covers a lot of ground. Maybe too much... Atlas Shrugged was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Ayn Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before... Benjamin Britten abhorred Brahms, whose First Symphony was found to be ugly and pretentious, while his Second was dull, ugly, gauche... Email has its faults, but it has also been, like journalism early in the 20th century, a cleansing agent for prose, inhibiting dull, abstract wordiness... What if you could fix global warming with a balloon, a few miles of hose, and a benign stream of sulfur dioxide? Good news? NO!... more ... For a man so haunted by the horrors of history, Daniel Goldhagens geopolitical views are either willfully naive or just plain idiotic... People find it easier to get pleasure from modern art than avant-garde music, and its not just a matter of conservatism and a love of Mozart... History of cities: Londoners have long been willing to live in filth. Orientals wasted time building sanitation systems and bathing, but Brits preferred making money... Malcolm Gladwell says his work succeeds or fails by its ability to engage you, to make you think." On that basis, his new book is a success... Kati Martons parents were brave people who paid for their courage in communist Hungary by being sent to prison. Yet it is a story with a happy ending... Heil Heidegger! Isnt it time we saw what a creepy little buffoon this guy was? He should be the butt of jokes, not the subject of dissertations... As the humanization of dogs hits absurd levels (56% of owners buy their pets Christmas gifts), were still eager to know about real dogginess... E.B. White didn’t hate grammar, but his patience was tried by various “outraged precisionists and comma snatchers.” ... William Butler Yeats’s work touched the greatest discoveries in modern physics and psychology. But he was also a poet of violence and horror... The year 1989 was perhaps the very best year in European history. It also may have been the last occasion when world history was made in Europe... Lionel Trilling: English prof, critic, and one-book novelist, he still generates interest long after his death, while his contemporaries are forgotten... Set against Napoleon, the Imperial Russian state was far from being a ramshackle despotism. It could fight with power and determination, and win... The Somme was the darkest hour not only in death, but in the life it gave later to class conflict and the rise of Nazism in Europe... In the shark-tank that was Henry VIIIs court, Thomas Cromwell was as deadly as any. But Hilary Mantel at least gives us a Cromwell we think we understand... A god whose existence you can prove is a god to whom you cannot pray, and prayer not proof is where religion rises or falls... Charles Dickens created force fields of imagery and thought as each new novel came to life, feeding the process along the way... Richard Dawkins devotes his latest book to showing the deep explanatory power of evolution while hammering creationists at every turn... Some little magazines carried poetry and fiction by unknown writers. Others shaped intelligent opinion to combat puffery in literary journalism... Inhumanly ruthless in his dealings with non-Bolsheviks and inept with Stalin, Leon Trotsky was too vain and self-deceiving to merit the status of tragic hero... The invention of cooking put us on our feet, shrank our guts, gave us silly teeth and small jaws, and ballooned our brains to a gigantic, fuel-inefficient size... Anatomist William Harvey claimed in the 17th century that the uterus is a second seat of intelligence. Odd, but perhaps he was onto something... Anglo-Saxons view the French with mixed amusement and horror. France is a land the English love to hate, hate to love, and cant get enough of... Let us face the unappetizing facts and just recognize Knut Hamsun for what he was: a pivotal figure in the literary canon and a disgusting human being... Thomas Hobbes: a hero to some, but to many philosophers the source of a malignant liberalism, Jacobinism, or even Bolshevism... It may have started nicely enough, but in the end Henry Wellcomes will to collect artifacts over the whole of human history was an unhealthy obsession... The poetry was great, but Rilke in person could be vain, self-pitying, obsessive, whining, arrogant, childish, lachrymose, and neurotic... In a clean-shaven town, the barber shaves all and only men who do not shave themselves. Was Georg Cantor driven nuts wondering who shaves the barber?... Andy Warhol wasnt just an artist. He was, in Arthur Dantos words, the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced... William Golding knew his own capacity for evil, and he was uneasy. “I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature”... Woodstock: sex, drugs, music, and mud. It now all looks so drab and dated. Its an event in history that is really, really over, says P.J. ORourke... That racist domination was the true basis for the British Empire has been repeated so often we forget how deeply false it is. Enter historian James Belich... James Joyces Ulysses : more venerated than read because it has been so long held in academic captivity. Declan Kiberd wants to set it free... J.R. Ackerleys Hindoo Holiday (1932) deserves an honored place in that literary genre of witty, campy, opinionated travel books by young colonials... Richard Dawkins compares creationists to Holocaust deniers and spoons an acid sauce of mockery onto their absurd confection of half-baked ideas... For half a century, Paul Nitze and George Kennan wrestled with the USSR, the Cold War, the nuclear threat, and with each other... It all began long ago with the death of the Prophet, but the Sunni/Shia split still haunts Islam and the world today... Many could not abide him, but if you care about the English language and questions of human nature, you must love Samuel Johnson... How does a culture that has become unmoored from its own past cope with an influx of newcomers? Thats Europes problem... Green Metropolis. A place where people drive, pollute, consume, and throw away much less than the national average: New York City... Darwins sexual selection theory, Goulds Birds of Australia, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The connection is a real one... Were the original pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries socialists or capitalists at heart? For us, of course, it’s becoming harder to tell the categories apart... The Islamic burka is a disputed but very potent human symbol. Many insist it stands only for piety. Marnia Lazreg disagrees... more ... John Rawlss ideal of justice may be best realized not with abstract liberalism, but with appeals to emotion, patriotism, and religion... Dogs are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only very different from ours, they are often invisible to us... The global financial crisis had made some leftists in the West go all nostalgic for the Soviet Union. John Gray can only smile... Sarkozy wants Muslim integration based on real respect: “When I enter a mosque, I take off my shoes,” he says. “When you enter a school, take off your veil”... Just as in the Great Depression, members today of the middle and professional classes wonder what the new normal will be. Not like the old... Linda Lovelace and James Fenimore Cooper, together at last, along with T.S. Eliot and Mickey Mouse. Its the wacky New Literary History of America... Dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain were destroyed not by monolithic force, but by myriad human beings impulsively reacting to the idea of freedom... Wrestling with Moses. Thats what Jane Jacobs did, and the war between her and city-builder Robert Moses was a struggle of titans... Did Thomas Jefferson father any or all seven of Sally Hemingss children? Its entirely possible. But the DNA evidence... Thomas Hobbes’s gloomy claim was that man’s existence is “nasty, brutish and short.” Frans de Waal shows this is rather unfair to the brutes... R. Crumbs version of Genesis is as full of sexualized violence as Tales from the Crypt and as disrespectful to cultural icons as Mad magazine... Starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, Louise Glück’s dark poems are hard to look away from... more ... Most of us are genetic dandelions: able to survive anywhere. Others are more like orchids: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming if given hothouse care... The history of the South is a dark little corner of the American past. Can light be thrown on it without seeming to defend slavery? Donald Livingston thinks so... Japanese: an excruciatingly difficult language with subtleties few foreigners can ever master. It is being simplified by the web even dumbed down... The august tutelage of Emerson, Thoreau, and her father made Louisa May Alcott acutely conscious of unseen, spiritual realities. Still, she could play them for laughs... Always with the complaining! Possibly the most noble and eloquent kvetch in the history of English poetry is Ben Jonson. Robert Pinsky explains... For many people, the moral life is based in religion, or at least in wisdom given to us by religion. No, says Marc Hauser: the moral sense is evolved... Kandinskys circles. Are they yeast cells budding, a haloed blue sun and candied satellites, or life itself escaping a careless primordial stew?... The struggle for equality between the sexes keeps coming down to motherhood, over and over again. Kay Hymowitz on men, women, and evolution... Art moves on, but essential qualities of decent critics do not change: knowledge, courage, and a way of finding aphorisms with good headline potential... Christopher Alexander: an architectural theorist who has inspired counterculture DIY-ers, smart-growth advocates, computer programmers, and more... Jessica is a plucky lass who, with mum and dads blessings, is determined to sail solo around the world. Might it all end in tears? Roger Sandall looks at a little history... Andy Warhols 200 One Dollar Bills goes up in price by tens of millions, while 200 actual one dollars bills become more worthless. James Panero on mysteries of the art market... For John Tierney, there is blame enough to spread around all sides in the debates over global warming. But the pilfered East Anglia emails still give us a lesson or two about science... more ... Martin Heidegger, a thinker many regard as the most important philosopher of the 20th century, was a bona fide, arm-saluting Nazi. How much should we care?... The Renaissance imagination reached farther across the globe than the ships of Spain or Genoa. Consider Petrarch and Boccaccio as geographers... Telling the taxi driver he was Cuban always elicited a warm reponse: “Ah, Cuba! Fidel Castro!” Taxi drivers of the world need to know about the Cuban Revolution, says Jos Prieto... Thanks to Best in Show, dog shows now have to go forward in an age of dog-show ridicule. How fair is that? Jesse Smith wonders... Little acts of social thuggery. The screaming kid on the airplane and the iPhone babbler in line at the bank exploit our patience and goodwill, says Amy Alkon... Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is so dumb you want to cheer, Die Cusack, Die! Amanda Peet and their kids, too. Its the end of the world, so please meet death like everyone else... The world has too many Malthusians, and whats worse, they are multiplying like rabbits, becoming a burden to clear thinking about human population growth... There are 36 arguments for the existence of God, each with some persuasive power. But every one of them has buried within it some kind of flaw... The fetishization of change is a symptom of a deep intellectual malaise in modern education theory, where truth, knowledge, and meaning have merely a provisional character... When Jane Austen doesnt like a character in one of her novels, she ceases to be the subtle, witty ironist everyone adores and turns into a vicious moral harridan... The Mumbai attacks: sixty harrowing hours. Jason Motlaghs minute-by-minute account shows us scenes of great heroism and horrifying cruelty... Louis Armstrong, even as a little boy, could easily see the ungodly treatment White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family I worked for”... Journalism and philosophy: how is it that the two humanistic intellectual activities that most boldly proclaim devotion to truth are barely on speaking terms?... The Arabian Nights, Brahma, Zoroaster, the Turkish Pasha: Mozarts operatic orientalism was part of a European tradition of tireless intellectual curiosity and scholarship... The Prodigal Son, his father said, was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. Along with Goldilock and Snow White, this is the first story Mary Gordon remembers... It is oppressive for math teachers to “transfer” their knowledge to students. Instead, they must help students construct their own understanding of math and find their own math solutions... Umberto Eco, himself on most peoples list of top world intellectuals, enjoys lists. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have preferences”... Isaiah Berlin was a sublime raconteur, a trapeze artist, soaring through every imaginable subject, spinning, flipping, hanging by his heels... With huge student debt and more young people than ever failing to complete a degree, its time to ask and honestly answer, Are too many students going to college?... Velázquezs Las Meninas is shown in a Prado gallery that often teems with people. This great work of art was painted, however, for an audience of one... In all cultures, music unfolds in time, with natural rhythms of respiration and pulse, says David Goldman. Tonal music of the West, however, adds a new element... Click, tweet, email, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the intellectual habits of internet life are killing storytelling, says Ben MacIntyre... Spaceship Jesus: Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of sixteen novels represents everything that is most deranged about religion. Frank Schaeffer explains... Scientists seem addicted to predictions lately, the more ominous or hysterical, the better. Science didnt used to be like this, says Stuart Blackman. Whats going on?... From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings crave to see skillful artistic performances. Then theres the shark in the tank... Russia’s historical misfortune and its tragic fate is its obsession with imaginary dangers and neglect of real ones, argues Walter Laqueur. Just look at its relation to Islam... Story-loving isnt just culture, its biology. The human brain has evolved to make and enjoy narratives. So as we enter the Age of Twitter... Dying languages. Would it be inherently evil, John McWhorter asks, if there were not 6,000 spoken languages, but only one? And what if it happened to be English?... Women are often the cruellest critics of other female writers. Where does this anger come from, and at what expense? Emily Gould wonders... Even if the beauties of a peacock’s tail, the Art of Fugue, and a stunning landscape have deep Darwinian roots, the pleasures they give us are quite different... Monsters stand for human vulnerability and crisis: zombies, vampires, and serial killers are imaginative foils for thinking about our own responses to menace... What panics critics of historic fiction, says Hilary Mantel, is not knowing for sure which bits are true. So just remember: when the author writes, He thought that, shes making it up... Indian novelists who write in English have often been accused, especially by readers and critics at home, of being inauthentic, sellouts. Times are changing... Great works of musical art always contain elements of ambiguity. Masterpieces dont push you around. Will the guys in white coats who study music ever get it?... Wisdom in medical treatment does not mean cookbook medicine. It needs a genuine partnership between doctor and patient, with complexity and uncertainty both recognized... FDRs Four Freedoms were depicted in 1943 in four uneven paintings by Norman Rockwell. Today, it is only Freedom of Speech that remains impressive... With the Internet, we create culture for ourselves, says Tyler Cowen. Maybe the book is less central now, but our daily lives can still be filled with beauty, suspense, and learning... James Fallows survived China. If you think that is but a minor achievement, consider a few health and pollution facts about life in that bustling land... In mournful tones, both Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy at the end blamed not only Johnson and his military for Vietnam, but also themselves... Okay, so lets assume for arguments sake that women have become less happy relative to men since 1972. Has feminism ruined their lives? Barbara Ehrenreich wonders... Copernicus needed evidence to support his new theory of the cosmos. When he saw America on the map, he knew he had found what he was looking for. Toby Lester explains... Ah, todays youth. The brightest do-gooders in history? Shallow narcissicists? A bunch of illiterate knuckleheads? All of the above, and more... Peter Paul Rubens, painter of those fleshy, pink nudes, was a man in control. In fact, he was a secret diplomat and spy, his artistic work a perfect cover... The saintly, white-haired Einstein was once the symbol of nuclear physics as most prestigious of all the sciences. Then, somehow, it all went wrong... Joseph Stiglitz claimed the current crisis was for market capitalism an equivalent of the Berlin Wall collapse. All analogies are imperfect, says Jagdish Bhagwati, but that was very dicey... Michael Vick’s fighting dogs were not put down: that would be a betrayal of loyalty. Professional football players, too, are selected for their loyalty to team and game... When Time magazines Henry Luce coined the phrase The American Century, it was already 1941. He turned out to be right in spades. So what about this century?... Herta Müller knows what it means to be a target of state terror. The Nobel Prize winner tells what the Rumanian secret police did to her... My Ardi, myself. Theres a lot to say about the new human ancestor, observes Lionel Tiger. And much of it has to do with how we prefer to see ourselves... There are in life three kinds of fools: real fools, professional fools, and unsuspecting fools. The professional fool, a staple of Shakespeare, is in reality nobody’s fool... Ridicule the Great Books, if you will, but do not forget they stood for the value of hard work to achieve understanding. Not the passive entertainment model college students now expect... The looming collapse of the U.S. entitlement system casts a giant shadow over the country’s future. How did America get itself into this mess?... Theodore Dalrymple was a prison doctor. So when a philosopher argues that prisons must be closed down, replaced by centers for reintegration, expect him to have an opinion... African-American Studies departments tend to hold front and center the idea racism is immensely influential in American life. John McWhorter does not disagree, but... Almost a year after AIG’s collapse, and despite a tidal wave of outrage, there was still no clear view of what toppled the company. Until Michael Lewis got on the case... Cultural warriors from the past have turned Roman Polanski into either a ventriloquist’s dummy or a voodoo doll to let off cheap moral steam. A plague on both sides, says Brendan ONeill... A principal cause of U.S. educational failure has been the dominance of a misguided how-to theory of language mastery. Schools need to teach commonly shared knowledge... Polymaths are scarcer today than in times past, with branches of knowledge fenced off from each other. Foxes used to roam free across the hills. Now hedgehogs rule... The argument Samuel Johnson started over the dictionary’s public role, was an early battle in what has come down to us as the culture wars. Yet another way he was ahead of his age... more ... California, fresh, lively, and forever oriented toward the future, has for more than a century been a model for the rest of America. So who killed it?... For undergrads, watching grad students in English struggle to gain Ph.Ds and find jobs is like watching young people in Rust Belt cities: the work isn’t there, the technology obsolete... We domesticated dogs, roses, and corn. Next in line are domesticated bacteria that will power reactors to give us unlimited clean energy... In Arles, Vincent planned to be methodical and determined: “more interesting as a man who knows what he is doing than as a mad genius, because everybody can be a mad genius”... Ted Kennedy, Victorian hero. You can tell good guys from bad on principles of Darwinian literary criticism. Kennedy was one of the good guys... There’s a lot of bad food in America, almost all of it eaten in god-awful chains. But in back streets and strip malls, you can also find uncounted small acts of culinary genius... Cultural studies may stand in some minds for half-assed research, self-congratulation, farcical pretension. Michael Bérubé sees in it the promise of an understanding that actually works... Art historical roads from Virgil, Ovid, and Dante to Vasaris Michelangelo begin with Homer, who incites us to imagine magnificent Greek palaces and their art... The price of a scoop. New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell ignored advice and was kidnapped in Afghanistan. Saving him left his interpreter and a British soldier dead... Hatred of America and those evil Jews, along with intricate conspiracy theories, helps to unite Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and their new friend, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad... You could hardly expect Plato to approve of Grand Theft Auto IV, with what hed have regarded as its puerile shoot-em-up values. But what about Aristotle?... American academics have shown little curiosity about conservative ideas. Will Berkeleys Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements make any difference?... more ... The professionalization of everyday life was a trend from the outset of modernity, and has grown hugely since the 1960s. Its a tyranny of experts... At its therapeutic best, womens shoe shopping takes place in hushed, carpeted salons, salesmen serving their Cinderella customers. Zappos has another idea... For Gail Hornstein, learning to write was a matter of sharply defining her ideas, making them vivid and pleasurable. How painful to unlearn nearly all shed been taught as a professional... Stand Up and Cheer! was meant as a morale booster for 1934, using song, dance, and little Shirley Temple to sell optimism in support of President Roosevelt... After cloistering himself to bring dead flesh to life, Victor Frankenstein condemned his creature to a solitude that made monsters of them both. Mary Shelley knew this loneliness... Economics, says Douglas Rushkoff, is not a natural science. It is game theory, and its assumptions have little to do with genetics, neurology, or evolution... What is snark? Abuse in a public forum that is low, personal, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious, and knowing. As David Denby explains... Norman Mailer’s obsession with violence found its greatest expression in his superb, civilized focus on boxings great heavyweights. In other settings he was less successful... Seventy years ago today, WWII began in Poland. How differently countries party to the event commemorate it. The view taken by Russia is perhaps the most troubling... more ...