The Devil's Music...
Giuseppe Tartini's Devil's Trill was dictated by Satan in a dream. Today, Tartini would likely be in a heavy metal band... Rock on!
1:42 PM 6/30/06
Desire to burn...
'If there's an afterlife,' writes poet Alicia Ostriker, 'I can picture Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain prowling through it together'... here.
6:13 PM 6/30/06
In praise of boredom...
Boredom is like olives, or antiques, or greens, or black-and-white movies, says Zoe Williams. It might actively be good for children, but only adults will really appreciate it... Really.
9:15 PM 6/29/06
Confronting the new misanthropy...
We've gone today far beyond the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. We have to face an entire cavalry regiment of media doom-mongers... giddy up.
10:13 PM 6/28/06
Self-inflicted wounds of the academic Left...
The academic left is nowhere today. Its faith-based politics has crashed and burned. It offers no plausible picture of the world, argues Todd Gitlin... Read it.
7:33 PM 6/27/06
American Pie...
Of all the naturalized foods of America, a Neapolitan street food became by far the most successful immigrant: Pizza... yum.
12:43 PM 6/26/06
Failure of academic feminism...
The scandal of academic feminism lies in ignoring the gender apartheid of the Islamic world and the steady inroads it is making into Europe... ... More.
11:41 PM 6/25/06
Being M. Badiou...
'There is always, in every truth procedure, a poetic moment,' says Alain Badiou. 'We can't even know a truth event without a sense of poetry'... More.
3:33 PM 6/24/06
The house in good taste...
Interior kitsch: Monet fridge magnets, fake 'bistro' clocks, any ornament with an angel or a dolphin or a picture of Frida Kahlo. And on it goes... here.
1:18 PM 6/23/06
The Great Transition...
Every human handshake echoes the Devonian: the structures we shake with --- shoulder, elbow, wrist --- were first seen in fish living in streams 370 million years ago... More.
7:35 PM 6/22/06
The Perfect Mark...
How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam.... More.
5:40 PM 6/21/06
Why are some animals so smart?
The technology explosion of the past 10,000 years shows that cultural inputs can unleash limitless human achievements. Culture can build a new mind from an old brain...Read on.
3:18 PM 6/20/06
Message misunderstood...
Academics love nouns, especially from Latin verbs: proceed turns into procedure, explore into exploration, etc. So bad writing begins... Bad writing has a sordid history. More.
5:43 PM 6/19/06
What would Kierkegaard do?
Soren Kierkegaard offered a new twist on old advice for life and faith: Look outward, as well as inward, before you leap... here.
8:15 PM 6/18/06
Guide to womenomics...
Women are perhaps the most under-utilized resource on the planet. Yet the future of the world economy lies in their hands... More.
9:32 PM 6/17/06
Minding our manners...
'Good manners' are but a code by which the elite distinguishes itself from hoi polloi in order to maintain its cultural power. Or so goes one argument... Read it.
10:15 PM 6/16/06
Paradise now..
The world was in disarray, shattered by the first world war and heading into a second. Out of this chaos came the modernists - a group of utopian designers with thrilling new visions of what the future could hold. But was anyone ready for this brave new world? Robert Hughes introduces the key players of modernism - and discovers how many of their dreams still survive... More.
4:45 PM 6/15/06
Heritage sold to the mouse at the back...
The cultural and artistic heritage of the world is in demand: looted, destroyed, mutilated, hidden from scrutiny, auctioned on eBay. Whose fault is this?... The answers?
3:43 PM 6/14/06
Dancers as living archives...
Is dance a fleeting art, purely ephemeral? Not quite. Long after they have left the stage, dancers are living archives of dance history... Read on.
9:10 PM 6/13/06
Getting fresh with Mozart...
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart left a corpus of 650 pieces, much of it radiant, eloquent music. Why do we always hear the same old six?... Why?
11:43 PM 6/12/06
Relatively deprived...
Is poverty absolute? Or is it a relative value, affected by a poor family's exclusion from DVDs, computers, cellphones, or vacation homes?... More.
11:40 PM 6/12/06
Time out...
We won't be around for a while. Editors going on a third-world tour to research on an upcoming art project we cannot tell you enough...We'll be back before you know it.
6:06 PM 12/2/05
Powerful words...
The stars of Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam pour their hearts out onstage, delivering their perspective on violence, sexism, racism and a host of other thought-provoking subjects with intensity and honesty. Here.
| | 5:43 PM 11/26/05
Blogger bemoans the fertile state of lit...
Many of our favorite bloggers are the so-called infertiles, (mostly) women who describe their struggles with infertility, multiple miscarriages, IVF and difficult pregnancy. Here.
9:32 PM 11/18/05
Architectural 9/11...
Truer words about rebuilding ground zero could not have been uttered. From the start, as Philip Nobel's new book makes clear, the efforts to design a fate for those 16 acres have been riven by different ... Here.
8:08 PM 7/7/05
Whose future is this anyway?
While the Bush adminstration brands the present as a kind of fiction, the question arises: Does the future stand a chance? Here.
5:43 PM 6/19/05
Let them eat prose...
On the danger to society posed by readily available, cheap literature... Here.
1:15 AM 6/1/05
Soundings...
Ezra Pound, "Lament of the Frontier Guard" Read aloud by Robert Pinsky, Wen Stephenson, and Charles Wright. Introduction by Wen Stephenson. Here.
1:01 AM 5/28/05
The spy who billed me...
In the post-9/11 rush to beef up intelligence, the government has outsourced everything from spy satellites to covert operations--- and well-connected companies are cashing in. Here.
8:16 AM 4/30/05
Root causes...
The recent Nobel Peace Prize winner talks about sowing the seeds of democracy in Kenya. Here.
11:46 AM 4/25/05
Bury the chains...
Uncovering the history and enduring impact of the world's first human-rights campaign. Here.
9:30 AM 4/1/05
Interrogating Donald Rumsfeld...
Thirty-seven questions Congress should ask the secretary of defense on Administration torture policies. Here.
11:06 AM 3/15/05
Technology and the Democrats...
Howard Dean is a good bet when the Democrats select their next National Committee chairman in February, but a couple of party operatives from Silicon Valley are running, too, and offer intriguing alternatives to the same-old, same-old. Here.
1:11 AM 3/6/05
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