Guardian
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Friends Indeed
It turns out that French poet Charles Baudelaire wasn’t very fond of his compatriot Victor Hugo. Despite having the novelist’s support when prosecuted after publishing Les Fleurs du Mal, the poet may have secretly despised (or perhaps just envied) Hugo—in a…
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Ladies Drink Free
Whether glamorized or pitied, the figure of the alcoholic writer has long been a subject of cultural fascination. Having written a book on the usual suspects—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al.—Olivia Laing asks the unfortunately necessary follow-up question: okay, but what about the…
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Fast and Slow Thinking
Psychologists believe that the brain has two complementary modes of thought. If you’re curious about the difference between system 1 (fast mode) and system 2 (slow mode), check out this Guardian review of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.…
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Manufacturing Reality
“But if we are going to manufacture our reality, couldn’t we make it a bit better? The thing we seem to like manufacturing the best are enemies, and here we are all guilty. Al-Qaida manufactured a vision of the west…
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Using Facebook to Incite Riots now Punishable by Law in the UK
Two young adult males–Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22–both just received four-year sentences for using Facebook to incite a riot in their Cheshire hometown that never happened. Despite the announcement over Facebook concerning the riots that were purportedly going…
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How Did Albert Camus Really Die?
There is a new theory displacing the old view of Albert Camus’ death by car crash. The French philosopher, author and Nobel Prize winner was traveling with his publisher, Michel Gallimard, when they crashed into a tree in 1960, with…
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The Story Behind “The Road Not Taken”
I’ve often said that Frost’s well-known poem is one of the most misinterpreted in American poetry (among casual readers, that is), and this story in the Guardian seems to back me up. It tells the story of Edward Thomas and…
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British Hacking Scandal Roundup
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the British phone hacking scandal is the lack of coverage in the US press. Among the US newspapers, the NY Times is the only one I can find which has done significant reporting on…
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A Romance Novel Health Scare
For the most part, a quick glance at the cover of any romance novel is all it takes to reveal the formula that’s inside. For better or worse, it’s a genre of fantasied gender stereotypes and it has long had…
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More on the Oxford Comma
As of yesterday, the Oxford Comma was seen reenacting moments from Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail and generally acting like a spastic teenager. It is quoted as saying “I’m not dead yet,” “I feel happy,” and “I think…
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Women in Sci Fi
The Guardian researches why the female presence seems to be diminishing in science fiction writing. Though there isn’t necessarily a shortage of female authors (or women publishers), there is a serious lack of female presence in the Guardian’s list of…
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Eros in Athens
This sounds like one hell of a show–the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (not the one in Georgia) has put together a collection of erotic art dating from the sixth century BC to the 4th century AD, including masterpieces…