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by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post
Bush is not the first president to have convinced himself that something he wanted to believe was, in fact, true.
by Lisa Prevost, Boston Globe
Ten school sin Massachusetts are testing a first-in-the-nation initiative to extend learning time. Believe it or not, the students (after initial grumbling) seem to like it, and so do their parents. Shouldn't every school rethink its schedule?
by Michael Winerip, New York Times
I came to understand that my own focus on Harvard was a matter of not sophistication but narrowness. I grew up in an unworldly blue-collar enviornment,. Getting perfect grades and attending an elite colleage was one of the few ways up I could see.
by Scott Adams, Dilbert Blog
Suppose there was a hit song that caused 80% of its listeners kill themselves. Should that song be banned, or would you argue that free speech is more important?
by Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times
For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor (carjackers should not bother) and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across the state offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherche alternative to the standard county jails, where the walls are bars, the fellow inmates are hardened and privileges are few.
by John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times
Perhaps worse than being in a prison with killers is sharing the island with no one but their ghosts.
by Brendan O'Neill, BBC News
The bestseller lists are full of memoirs about miserable childhoods and anguished families. Waterstone's even has a "Painful Lives" shelf. Why are authors confessing their hurt so freely and do readers find morbid enjoyment in them?
by Joel Brouwer, New York Times
A fun game for poetry nerds: read the first line or sentence of a favorite poet's first book, and image it as a summary of the writer's entire career. This works more ofthen you might think.
by Ethan Todras-Whitehill, New York Times
New Age-style sacred travel, or metaphysical touring, is a growing branch of tourism, particularly in countries like Egypt with strong ancient-civilization pedigress.
by Scott Gordon, Josh Modell, Noel Murray, Sean O'Neal, Tasha Robinson, Kyle Ryan, A.V. Club
"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."
by Richard Reeves, Yahoo!
We lost our way, and now we have lost a man who helped us find a better way.
by Riverbend, Salon
I'm finally leaving Iraq. But it's hard to decide which is more frightening: Car bombs and militias, or leaving everything you know and love.
by Adam Gopnik, The Guardian
The fable-like story of a teenager who falls in love at first sight with a beautiful girl, only to spend the rest of his life searching for her. Le Grand Meaulnes is one of the msot admired novels in French literature.
by Joel Keller, New York Times
New Jersey may be the diner capital of the world, but Rhode Island is the diner's birthplace.
by Tim Goodman, San Francisco Chronicle
Since this is TV-Turnoff Week — one of the most reactionary, ill-advised movements in memory — now is the perfect time to better understand the hot-button issue of kids and television. "Teletubbies," for many people, was a flash point.
by Art Winslow, Huffington Post
In the new book burning we don't burn books, we burn discussion of them instead. I am referring to the ongoing collapse of book review sections at American newspapers, which has accelerated in recent months, an intellectual brownout in progress that is beginning to look like a rolling blackout instead.
by Caroline Leavitt, New York Magazine
Me, my ex, his siter, her ex, and his shrink. A true story about lies, in which no one escapes unscathed.
by Taylor Dinerman, Wall Street Journal
Scientific heavyweight Stephen Hawking experiences weightlessness.
by Matthew L. Wald, New York Times
Plenty of people still go to school hoping for a job at the airlines flying the big jets, but experts fear that the hobbyist, who flies as an alternative to golf or boating, or perhaps to take the family 100 miles to a beach or maybe just an obscure restaurant, is disappearing.
by Jori Finkel, New York Times
The doe and other animals preside over the entrance of a new 8,000-square-foot exhibition space here at the Skirball Cultural Center, really a children's museum that takes the form of Noah's Ark.
by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed
We have something in common: It is very easy for others to take what we do for granted. As far as most civilians are concerned, printed matter is generated by parthenogenesis, then distributed across the land like the spores of a ripe dandelion, transmitted by the wind.
We know better. We do what we can with our shrinking budgets — secure in the knowledge that the work itself is worthwhile, if not always secure in much else.
by Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle
It occurred to me, as I was sitting through "Grindhouse," that it might be a kind of Mannerist work, a late-stage, extravagantly self-referential indulgence in violence turning back on itself and consuming its own tail. Maybe, I thought, this is a Moment in movie history. I don't really believe that, but it was pleasing to think about it for a while, when the blood was covering a helicopter windshield or another skull was split wide open by a bullet.
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
The most enticing property yet found outside our solar system is about 20 light-years away in the constellaton Libra, a team of European astronomers said yesterday.
by Juliet Glass, New York Times
Producers are trying to use more humane methods to fatten the livers of geese and still satisfy chefs.
by Alfred Corn, Slate
by Heather Havrilevsky, Salon
With Alex Baldwin's latest travails, the world wonders, "What's so wrong about name-calling, stupid?"
by Sandra Blakeslee, New York Times
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
by Charles Isherwood, New York Times
It's embarrassing to admit now, but there was a time in my life when I preferred the cheesy antics of "The Benny Hill Show" to the more rarefield silliness of "Monty Python's Flying Circus."
by Laura Miller, Salon
How an ancient epic full of sex,violence and a pre-biblical flood got lost and found, and how its legacy lives on in "Lethal Weapon."
by Robert Pinsky, Slate
The much-maligned art.
by Larry Kramer, Los Angeles Times
Dear straight people, why do you hate gay people so much?
by Stephen Dunn, New Yorker
by April Bernard, New Yorker
by Atul Gawande, New Yorker
Medicine has increased the ranks of the elderly. Can it make old age any easier?
by Richard Rayner, New Yorker
by Sean Smith, Newsweek
'The Simpsons' is a sitcom legend. Now it's coming to a theater near you.
by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Most books by politicians are, at bottom, acts of salesmanship: efforts to persuade, beguile or impress the reader, efforts to rationalize past misdeeds and inoculate the author against future accusations. And yet beneath the sales pitch are clues — in the author's voice, use of language, stylistic tics and self-presentation — that provide some genuine glimpses of the personalities behind the public personas. In short, when candidates decide to publish, they can still run, but they can't hide — at least not entirely.
by Rachel Donadio, New York Times
Since the end of the cold war, historians have mined the Russian archives for insights into the nature of the Soviet empire and its global reach. But after a golden age in the early 1990s, archival access eroded.
by David J. Garrow, New York Times
Pro-choice doctors — and their lawyers — must have the courage to take Justice Kennedy at his word and read this decision's explicit approval of all abortion procedures save on ein a manner that will most expansively continue to protect women's reproductive rights.
by David Bordwell
We have different conceptions of cinema's artistic dimensions, and we won't find unanimity of opinion among filmmakers, critics, academics, or audiences.
by Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
Earth Day has served its time, and it must go.
by Sam Jordison, The Guardian
There's plenty of money to be made from them, but the genuine value of such fetishised rarities is hard to discern.
by Philip Kennicott, Washington Post
First there was an idea, and then a plan. Then, over the course of Washington's first century of existence, there was a lot of buildings, a living-up-to the plan and a filling in of empty space. And with the 20th century, there was finally a city of sorts, though it's not clear if Washington really thinks of itself in those terms. What we have here is an identity crisis, a failure of urbanity.
by Beth Gardiner, Los Angeles Times
The city is booming, brimming with a new confidence. Its street markets are some of the best places to see the rapid evolution up close.
by Anthony Faiola, Washington Post
Gray matter is the new black of the hip social scene.
by David Colman, New York Times
Novelty underwear, for decades the butt of jokes and the joke of butts, has, in the last two to three years, turned into a serious business.
by Somini Sengupta, New York Times
As income rise and ways of eating change, the inevitable has happened. Street food, that emblem of raucous, messy, urban India, is slowly being tamed.
by Salma Abdelnour, Food & Wine
The cuisines of the world are merging into one giant, amorphous mass. The problem is, too many chefs worldwide are creating menus that flit across so many borders and reference so many traditions that they — and we — lose any sense of place.
by Richard T. Cooper and Valerie Reitman, Los Angeles Times
Liviu Librescu had survived the Holocaust. He died Monday holding the classroom door shut against a youthful gunman.
by Phoebe Nobles, Salon
Raw, steamed, roasted, grilled: For two months straight, I ate asparagus like I was savoring each minute of spring.
by Terri Witek, Slate
by Sharon Begley, Newsweek
Can animals and robots be self-aware?
by Jean Valentine, New Yorker
by John Burnside, New Yorker
by Barbara A. MacAdam, ARTnews
True, it never really went away. But abstraction is in the midst of a revival, flaunting its brilliant past as it reconfigures itself for the future.
by J.R. Moehringer, Los Angeles Times
Throughout the evolution of western civlization, the tie was the sign of a gentleman. Now it's a date-killer.
by Jeanne Marie Laskas, Washington Post
Maybe it's time for all of us to shut our mouths.
by Rachel Hillmer and Paul Kwiat, Scientific American
Using readily available equipment, you can carry out a home experiment that illustrates one of the weirdest effects in quantum mechanics.
by Dan Brekke, Salon
When a musician recorded "Green Eggs and Ham" in the voice of vintage Bob Dylan and posted it online, the Grinch estate promptly replied: One fish, two fish, cease and desist.
by Leland McInnes, The Narrow Road
Mathematics has become hopelessly detail oriented.
by Stephen Regenold, New York Times
Nevada State Route 375 bisects a wide basin, coursing northbound before disappearing into a haze of nothingness beyond.
This is Alien Country, where more U.F.O.'s are sighted each year than at any other place on the planet, at least according to Larry Friedman of the Nevada Commission on Tourism.
by Harvey Fierstein, New York Times
What I am really enjoying is watching the rest of you act as if you had no idea that prejudice was alive and well in your hearts and minds.
by John Fraser, Globe And Mail
There's never enough to be done for the beleaguered world of books.
by Kathleen A. Hughes, New York Times
If all Americans line-dried for just half a year, it would save 3.3% of the country's total residential output of carbon dioxide, experts say.
by Kenneth Chang, New York Times
An experiment that some hoped would reveal a new class of subatomic particles, and perhaps even point to clues about why the universe exists at all, has instead produced a first round of results that are mysteriously inconclusive.
by Barry Schwartz, New York Times
What T.G.I.Friday's can tell us about mammograms.
by Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post
Cassandra Devine knows how to solve the coming "entitlements" crisis, preordained when the 77 million baby boomers begin hitting 65 in 2011: Pay retirees to kill themselves, a program she calls "transitioning." Volunteers could receive a lavish vacation beforehand ("a farewell honeymoon"), courtesy of the government, and their heirs would be spared the estate tax. If only 20 percent of boomers select suicide before the age of 70, she says, "Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid will be solvent. End of crisis."
by Russ Parsons, Los Angeles Times
Is progress taking the farmers out of farmers markets? And is that a bad thing?
by Alan Cowell, New York Times
Should it be slithery or scrunchy, glutinous or grilled? The answer, British scientists say, may be divined by a formula: N = C + {fb(cm) . fb(tc)} + fb(Ts) + fc. ta.
by Gary Kamiya, Salon
Afraid to challenge America's leaders or conventional wisdom about the Middle East, a toothless press collapsed.
by Sarah Miller, Los Angeles Times
Sure, times have changed, but can't people shut off their cellphones and quiet down for a little while?
by Daniel Tobin, Slate
by Daivd Brown, Washington Post
If one is not a mathematician (and except for a few of you out there, who is?), it's going to be impossible to actually understand why Euler was such a great man. Other people will have to tell us, and we should probably believe them.
by Natalie Angier, New York Times
Universal does not mean uniform, and the definition sof sexual desire can be as quirky and personalized as the very chromosomal combinations that sexual reproduction will yield.
by C. K. Williams, New Yorker
by Philip Levine, New Yorker
by Marguerite Duras, New Yorker
by James Parker, Boston Globe
The writer's guide as self-help genre.
by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.
by Tim Wu, Slate
Touring Thailand with only the internet as my guide.
by Trisha Ready, The Stranger
I lost my breast and my nephew to cancer, but not my bullshit detector.
by Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times
Parents have long depended on their children to be in-house experts on fashion, technology and pop culture, to introduce them to fresh music, purge their closets of ghastly apparel and troubleshoot household electronics.But the nature and pervasiveness of child-to-parent advice has reached new proportions for a variety of reasons.
by Frannk Furedi, Spiked
Fear plays a key role in twenty-first century consciousness. Increasingly, we seem to engage with various issues through a narrative of fear. You could see this trend emerging and taking hold in the last century, which was frequently described as an 'Age of Anxiety'. But in recent decades, it has become more and better defined, as specific fears have been cultivated.
by Carol McCabe, Washington Post
I should have called ahead. By the time I checked in, Journalism was gone, as was Geography and Travel. The choice was down to Germanic Languages or Philosophy. That's how I came to spend a recent night in Room 1100.003, in the company of Messrs. Kant, Hegel, Voltaire and Sartre, with George Soros lying on the nightstand.
by Whitney Dangerfield, Smithsonian Magazine
New findings rekindle old debates about when the first people arrived and why their civilization collapsed.
by Kim Severson, New York Times
From a policy perspective, Mr Bloomberg has taken on more food issues, and provoked more controversy, than any New York mayor before him. As a result, he has the potential to change the way more New Yorkers eat — whether in the haughtiest dining rooms or the poorest home kitchens — than all the city's food activists and restaurant critics combined.
by Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times
So it is slightly surprising to walk into Steve Wilson's class at 6.35 a.m. and find 32 students not only present and awake but also barely able to contain their enthusiasm over the start of another school day.
by Mary Kinzie, New Yorker
by Dan Chiasson, New Yorker
by Don DeLillo, New Yorker
by Elvira Brody, Newsweek
When my mother died, we weren't expecting a fortune. Then we looked in the back of her freezer.
by Carl Zimmer, New York Times
A number of psychologists argue that re-experiencing the past evolved in our ancetors as a way to plan for the future and the rise of mental time travel was crucial to our species' success. But some experts on animal behavior do not thnk we are unique in this respect. They point to several recent experiments suggesting that animals can visit the past and future as well.
by Joseph Kahn and Daniel J. Wakin, New York Times
With the same energy, drive and sheer population weight that has made it an economic power, China has become a considerable force in Western classical music.
by Oscar Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle
All this legerdemain over categorizing books implies that there's something second-rate about writing and reading fiction.
by Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Lessons from an imporable collaboration.
by Joan Acocella, New Yorker
How writers used to write.
by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Boston Globe
The gentrification of rundown city neighborhoods conjures an image of well-off whites displacing poor minorities. What's actually going on is far more complex, and the winners and losers can be hard to predict.
by David Brown, Washington Post
Why is it that Americans speak of trying to whip cancer, show courage in the face of it, and die after a long battle against it? Why at the same time do we tel ourselves cancer is the new diabetes, a chronic disease we can have for a lifetime?
by Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times
In an odd and, I grant, surreal way. Starbucks may be one of the last remaining venues where Americans of different views can fraternize peaceably, united in their jonesing for caffeine.
by Nora Isaacs, San Francisco Chronicle
My book reading across town started at 6:30. At 6:35 I was still stuck in traffic. So many things had gone wrong during the promotion of this book that I couldn't help feeling that the gods were putting me through some sadistic test. For my book party, the cartons of books got reouted and remained in a storage truck in South San Francisco. During a radio interview, an old roommate with a grudge called in. Earlier that month, my laptop was stolen, and with it, all of the contacts I needed to get this book tour going.
The title of my book? "Women in Overdrive: Find Balance and Overcme Burnout at Any Age." The irony was not lost on me.
by Ann Hulbert, New York Times
Can China create schools that foster openness, flexibility and innovation? And what happens to China if it does?
by Paul Farhi, Washington Post
Most every comic deals with aspects of the job such as constant travel. And working nights in boozy joints. And the nonexistent job security, wildly variable pay and isolation from friends and family. But for female comics, there's also the facet of being in a culture — and a business — that's uneasy with the idea of a woman generating laughter.
by Mark Bittman, New York Times
Whether the setting is a formal dining room or a breakfast nook, whether the food is prime rib or eggplant Parmesan, it is the presence of loved ones in a drawn-out, laid-back, barrier-breaking atmosphere that really counts.
by Steve Hendrix, Washington Post
A hard-core competitor on the professional barbecue circuit attempts to persuade a bunch of amateurs to award him the prize he covets most.
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