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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 […]

This has been one busy week, both volcanically and personally, so I’m going to try not to write another three posts today. So, instead, let’s try to summarize all the […]

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 […]

Brands regarded as exclusive, arrogant, daring or trendy are beginning to suffer severe declines in popularity, while those associated with quality, reliability and durability are rising.

A new paper that finds that male professors who are “hot” are financially rewarded, while female professors who are “hot” are not.

In case you didn’t notice, we inaugurated a President yesterday! Back in October, before we knew who he would be, I invited edubloggers to write a letter to the next President. […]

While online tools for personal finance management like Mint and Outright make it increasingly easier to keep track of our “digital money,” there’s something to be said for the dwindling […]

The element—like an attractive woman—is very much in demand in Bolivia. Unless the government finds a national company it can partner with to industrialize lithium, private companies will soon enter […]

I’m creating a commercial right now for the fourth project at my film school. It’s a standard 30 second spot and is centered around helping people find out what’s happening […]

An companion piece to Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra’s elegant Times Op-Ed on India is Isaac Chotiner’s essay in the Times Book Review on (literary magazine)Granta’s Pakistan Issue. Chotiner references Pakistani […]

One of the difficulties of following or writing about Yemen is that alarmism tends to become a series of “oh, and also”, which lessenes its impact. Right now it looks […]

We see them every time we go to a museum, but we never really see them. Like Rodney Dangerfield, frames get no respect. Julius Lowy Frame & Restoring Company, Inc. […]

So it turns out there are actually three outstanding holiday movies–TRUE GRIT, THE KING’S SPEECH, and THE FIGHTER. True Grit is, as I’ve said, very ambitious and philosophically pretentious.  It […]

Writing in the Yemen Observer, Nasser Arrabyee- to whose blog we have linked here, and to which you should go every day- has a brief article about the drug trade […]

Country Strong hasn’t been taken seriously by film critics. I’m not going to review what they’ve said or speculate on why they said it. I’m just going to explain why […]

Watching American media outlets attempt to cover the events happening in Egypt over the past few days reminded me of just how ignorant we are about the rest of the […]

One of the great fallacies of our time is that of American reasonableness—a fantasy that obscures the violent and often contradictory actions of many of this country’s citizens and its government.

No, no- this isn’t going to discuss the breathtaking architecture, the astonishing, fascinating history or the diverse and beautiful culture of Yemen. Don’t be absurd. Greg and I have analytical […]

Kickstarter is a site that allows anyone to raise money from an online community in order to fund any sort of project. Here’s a primer on how to turn your vision into a reality.

Recently, I had the rare opportunity to be on both The Colbert Report and the Conan show. As you can imagine, we had a madcap, hilarious romp through time travel, […]

Author on economic sustainability Adam Werbach says environmentalists must embrace emerging technologies and engage corporations as part of its strategy.

“Beautifully preserved bees, ants, spiders and other small prehistoric creatures that lived 50 million years ago have been unearthed in a huge amber deposit in India.”

The city that kept out the Republicans and banned Happy Meals has a long history of doing things its own way. The Independent on the history of San Fran.