Let me recommend to you this fine review of this season’s best movie. Once again, I think the Coen brothers more than flirt with nihilism. The murderous violence of the film […]
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It was an elegant accident of editorial timing: two major articles on post-traumatic stress (and the attendant increase in prescription pill use among members of our military), and a beautiful, […]
In my short time as an educator, I have already suffered through enough acronyms, initiatives, and memes to give me a dull sense of despondence not unlike some of the […]
Islamic suicide bombers are motivated by a lack of sex, says evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. The scientist has put forth some controversial views on popular topics.
Blue Valentine is a psychologically ambitious and impressively subversive effort by a new filmmaker. It is, in a subtle but clear way, a pro-life movie. It’s quite jarring and claustrophobic; […]
“A man’s shaved head—whether it’s to-the-skin or with slight stubble—can suggest a sigh-inspiring combination of intellectual depth and machismo.”
If you dnate to the relief effort in Japan, you can enter a chance to win this new book about the past and present of Japanese art.
Is being fat a bar to the highest political office? Skinny liberals beware: many Americans equate being thin with elitism.
Amanda of Pandagon points to a disturbing ABC News story about teens getting plastic surgery in a bid to escape bullying or, and/or to recover from the psychological scars of […]
These are my notes from the 3rd annual Constructivist Celebration, hosted by Gary Stager at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Gary Stager 150 participants here today See constructivistconsortium.org/books for constructivist teaching […]
Thanks to the beauty of wireless internet (it is called WiFi, yes?) and Philadelphia, which has become one of my favorite cities over the past few months, I have a […]
The argument for or against e-books always seems to boil down to one central issue: e-books can not be touched, bookmarked and lovingly annotated in the same way that real […]
“It never phased him that we’d call out different tunes from the stage and change the set around endlessly to stop from being bored,” Radiohead front man Thom Yorke says […]
As Steven Johnson notes in his wonderful new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, innovation often happens when hunches and concepts from different disciplines bump up against each other in […]
I’ve been wanting to write this piece for a long time, but never figured out the right outlet. This blog, however, is a great space for me to try it […]
When Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, who works primarily in black and white, encountered a photograph by Mika Ninagawa of Technicolor flowers in close-up during a tour of a museum, he […]
As heartbreaking as the job losses and foreclosures are, there is also a bright side to the downward economy — Americans are beginning to see that “less is more.”
Is the recent tectonic activity around Japan a forewarning that Japan’s largest volcano will blow? Probably not, explains volcanologist Erik Klemmeti.
The announcement that Susan Philipsz had won the Turner prize—Britain’s most embattled arts prize—was rendered almost inaudible by the chants and whoops of student protesters.
How the divide in wealth between the rich and the poor is being maintained through marriage.
A limited-edition map celebrated the coincidence of a patriotic occation with a pig-centric one.
The father of fractal geometry “was one of the most visionary mathematicians from the latter part of the twentieth century,” writes Boston University professor Robert Devaney.
So for the slow weekend, I thought I’d stick in some more thoughts of movies I saw a year or so ago, before I became a BIG THINKer. I saw A Single […]
I recently received a text message from my friend, Wes, that asked me when I was going to get back to blogging. One of the personal projects littering my to-do […]
“My beard points to heaven, and I feel the nape of my neck on my hump,” Michelangelo wrote in a poem about his experience painting the ceiling of the Sistine […]
Long before “The Situation” and his kind entered the zeitgeist, Andy Warhol filmed his own reality show featuring his personal constellation of “Superstars”—artists, musicians, poets, actors, models, and sometimes just […]
For Americans, the name Iran conjures certain key images—the Shah, the Revolution of 1979, the hostages, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and black chador-clad women. Worn as part of the Islamic code […]
Taste is both a sense and a preference; a gustatory pleasure and a social inquiry of what’s beautiful, proper, unique and stylish. What is taste on a neurological level and […]
According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, Domenico Ghirlandaio—whose frescoes graced the walls of the Sistine Chapel before those of his apprentice, Michelangelo—once called the art of mosaics as “vera pittura per […]
As a kid, I enjoyed producing written word. I hated the act of writing, but I enjoyed looking down and seeing my words on paper — and feeling like I’d […]