Like Jerry Lewis, comic books seem to be an American institution best appreciated and understood by the French. Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic […]
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Today’s installment of our series “The Future in Motion” features Joseph Sussman, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, and Douglas Malewicki, Aerospace engineer and inventor of the SkyTran. The SkyTran is […]
Unhappy news to banish the lingering Earth Hour glow from your cheeks: New York State is hemorrhaging environmental conservation jobs, and funding. Governor Paterson’s “winter of reckoning” (not altogether a […]
Death challenges the strength of any family. A suicide can tear a family apart. Art dealer Carl David, fourth in a line of a four-generation family owned art gallery, recounts […]
Then you’ll want to learn from Bill Brown, professor of English and the visual arts at the University of Chicago and the creator of “thing theory.” What is thing theory? […]
Today is the first day of Passover. To most Jewish people, that means a seder, matzo, wine, recounting the story that’s in the Haggadah. To Rabbi Niles Goldstein, it’s more […]
In the classic Western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, James Stewart’s character confesses that he wasn’t a hero, only to hear the newspaper man he’s confessed to respond, […]
In his latest op/ed Nick Kristof is lamenting the fact that girls are outperforming boys at school. Kristof is as ardent a defender of women’s rights as anyone in the […]
Judith Thurman’s Talk of the Town piece in this week’s New Yorker details how an unknown Italian “journalist” fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham (the odd selection of those […]
Michelangelo spent most of his life on a massive guilt trip. When he painted The Crucifixion of St. Peter in 1550 (pictured), he inserted not one, but two self-portraits. To […]
Now that we’ve established that attractive people earn more money, apparently it’s not just academics who are beginning to notice a difference in lifestyle. With state and federal governments looking […]
As we mentioned in a previous post, Einstein himself was worried about the possibility that time travel was built into his General Theory of Relativity. In 1949, when his good friend […]
Armageddon. Impeachment. Fascist. Communist. Muslim. Radical. Baby killer. The language of political discourse in America has been reduced to alarming idioms and dramatic phrases. It is the kind of overheated […]
As many of its activists depend on unemployment for inspiration and government benefits, can the Tea Party movement survive an economy on the rebound?
President Obama will take advantage of the Congress’ recess to fill 15 economic posts allowing him to circumvent the Senate’s confirmation process.
Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune advocates legalizing marijuana as a solution to the spiraling violence of the Mexican-American drug trade.
Absent legal protection, medical marijuana users are still subject to company drug policies which can result in being fired for drug use.
After buying 27 percent of Citibank to keep it afloat, the federal government is ready to sell its shares for an estimated profit of $8 billion.
The key to surviving global warming will be to develop an economy that empowers the impoverished to meet global clean-energy demands.
$200 daily helicopter shuttles to and from work demonstrate that Wall Street is up and running again after the recession and plenty of traffic jams.
The Christian Science Monitor is as surprised as anyone at the emergence of many New Calvinists trying to bring Puritanism back to America.
Once an employee of the Secret Service, the computer hacker Albert Gonzalez has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for credit card fraud.
The Texas school board’s recent decisions to make the local curriculum more conservative is troublesome in light of the state’s disproportionate influence on national textbook sales.
The health care bill was a huge, and even historic, victory for Democrats. In fact, the Democrats are on something of a roll. Not only did they manage to pass […]
How do you get people in a democratic society to change their way of life? The theme has come up a lot at gatherings of climate scientists and environmentalists I’ve […]
Sadly, the memorials to the art of Andrew Wyeth since his death early last year have been few. I personally find it difficult to understand the lack of response to […]
Or better yet, turn them off, full stop – at 8:30pm tonight, Saturday, March 27, 2010 – and let jah moon come shinning in, into our life again. Singing, ooh, […]
Google has announced it will select a city where it will install a super-fast Internet network; about 600 communities have already applied for the experiment to test the viability of such a network.
Researchers at the recent European Breast Cancer Conference said that up to one-third of cases could be prevented by a healthier diet and exercise regime.
The Department of Justice has released counter-terrorism ideas sent to it by American civilians including parachuting bears into Afghanistan to hunt for Osama bin Laden.