The Farto was just one of over three hundred ships to meet its end on this obscure, crescent-shaped wandering sandbank
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When I was a child and decided to become a physicist, I never dreamed that I would be traveling all over the world with a TV film crew, or lecturing […]
I’m just getting on a flight from Medellín, Colombia. No, I wasn’t hanging out with drug lords, war lords, or Nazis who fled Germany after World War II. I was […]
Long before reality television challenged our faith in the sustainability of the human race, documentary films were an intriguing look into the minds and hearts of some fascinating subjects. By […]
Let’s face it: The planet is heating up, Earth’s population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than […]
What does the future look like? We essentially rely on science fiction thrillers to give us a taste of what lies ahead for humanity: Avatar; Iron Man; I, Robot; Surrogates; […]
Nobel-Prize winning physicist William Phillips admits that “laser cooling” is a somewhat confusing concept. How can light energy, generally thought of as a source of heat, be used to cool […]
Allegorical fiction can take very complex realities and convey them in powerful, emotional, psychologically accurate way.
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The Harvard critic recalls feeling genuinely anxious about how things would turn out for the hero of “The Magic Mountain.”
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Influencing tastes across social networks is a tricky business: a love of “Love Actually” spreads differently than a love of “Pulp Fiction.”
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Despite centuries of Anglo-French tension, Stratford’s favourite son is as popular in Paris as he is in London
With a society prospering in splendid isolation and a population smaller than one-thousandth of the EU total (1), Iceland until recently had little incentive to be subsumed by the Brussels […]
5,000,000 Hits n Thirty hits – that’s how many this blog accumulated for the whole of September 2006, the first month of its existence. The numbers for October were a bit better – […]
The New York Times cover story on John Updike’s archives reveals a writer who took care to develop and preserve his literary legacy. While an instinct for careful self-preservation is […]
Meanwhile, let another Rolling Stone reporter take your attention, for a different if no less compelling reason: a meditation on a writer we miss, David Foster Wallace. In the latest […]
Wall Street II features a hedge fund manager. What will he be like? N+1 editor Keith Gessen has published a book,Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous […]
“If ants wrote a stage play for human characters, it would look like this,” writes Barbara Kingsolver of E.O. Wilson’s first novel, Anthill. In a powerhouse-eco-figures play, the New York […]
Leave it to a comic book icon to cause a flag-related stir as the 4th of July weekend approaches. Wonder Woman, everyone’s favorite 69-year-old Amazon, celebrated the 600th issue of […]
When Facebook’s privacy woes hit the webosphere, people quickly fell into two camps: those who believed that we now “live in public” and should accept it, and those who were […]
Creating fictional people that seem real requires, among other things, writing a final draft in which you “take out all the lies.”
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One of the mainstays of speculative history (together with “What if the South had won the US Civil War?”) is: What would the world have looked like if the Nazis […]
I rarely watch Meet The Press since Tim Russert died, and even then, I wasn’t all that regular a viewer. David Gregory, Russert’s replacement, may be a smart guy, but […]
Up to 8,000 people each year go hunting for a legendary gold mine, guided by cryptic maps like these.
Michael Moore is in a class by himself when it comes to generating news attention, advance publicity, and box office for his documentary films. For example, when I was in […]
Last week, the NAACP passed a resolution at its annual convention asking Tea Party leaders to condemn the racists in their ranks. The NAACP was right on the money. Regardless […]
Long dead and gone, the Rochester Subway lives on in the imagination – and on this map
Given the exploding coal mines in West Virginia, apocalyptic oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, and the volcanic ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull glacier that stranded millions of people […]
“In fact, it is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. Some say that the only thing that quantum theory has […]
The author stays up trying to figuring out where to position her writing desk, and solves many of her fictional questions in her sleep.
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Prester John as virtual as he was virtuous, the legend literally too good to be true.