“To me, the unsung villain of the mortgage crisis is the 30-year fixed rate self-amortizing mortgage with no prepayment penalty,” says Megan McArdle at The Atlantic.
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“We could be living inside a black hole. This head-spinning idea is one cosmologist’s conclusion based on a modification of Einstein’s equations.” The New Scientist on some very new astronomy.
A federal court has ruled that cheerleading cannot properly be called a sport because it does not provide for equal opportunities and participation in sports. Has the court gone too far?
“Where does our sense of right and wrong come from?” David Brooks at The New York Times prefers a naturalistic explanation of moral code over a purely divine or rational one.
“It looks like an iPad, only it’s 1/14th the cost: India has unveiled the prototype of a $35 basic touchscreen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011.”
“Biofuels have always sounded better during the Iowa caucuses than they have performed in reality.” The Chicago Tribune on why federal ethanol subsidies may be on the chopping block.
If people realized how different they are from their fellow citizens, the country would fall apart in a weekend. Working as a journalist taught me that. I can’t help noticing, […]
Bioethicist Jacob Appel believes that Washington should fortify all of our drinking water with trace amounts of lithium, which has been show to decrease suicides.
n n If you want reliable, world-class journalism, you could do worse than The Economist. This London-based weekly magazine excels in reporting of the respectably serious kind. Serious, as in […]
. n . n American cities are gridded, and thus easily readable and navigable. Their Old World counterparts are older, messier and much more disorienting. That is the conventional wisdom. […]
n . n “No, I already understand how to copy and paste,” says the bearded man on his mobile to some kind of computer helpline. “What I want to do […]
n . n “And if I ever have a son, I think I’m gonna name him… n Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!” n (Johnny […]
n n n Every disaster is always bigger than the last one. Newspapers and tv anchors have to say that, don’t they? Otherwise it wouldn’t be news. But those slick-covered […]
. n n n n n To my admittedly vague recollection, The Streets of San Francisco was a mid-Seventies tv series very appropriately named after its main character. I was too […]
. . . The exemplary specimen of what were labelled, in the early 1980s, the ‘chattering classes’, was Islington Man (*). Both terms described a certain type of city-dwelling British […]
California’s varied landscape has stood in for half the world in Hollywood movies. Here is Paramount Studios’ 1927 map of international filming locations, all set in California.
Not merely a nice flower, but also a political tool
The only fictional map to feature prominently in the Three Stooges body of work
“Paula” is the emblem of the western world’s most populous sub-nation
We’ve discussed the Ancient Greeks’ snowglobe vision of the Universe(#288), tackled the far-out theories of the Hollow Earth (#85), and yet managed to be surprised by the absurdity of the square […]
n “China’s internet is open.” n (PRC government spokesperson responding to a question on Google’s announcement to stop filtering its Chinese search engine, citing concerted hacker attacks on the e-mail […]
Washington DC as a big, red heart, pumping life-blood through the arteries of the nation’s body? Few Americans will view their oft-reviled capital as favourably as this metaphor suggests. However, […]
“I have been seeing this image almost every day for years, but only a few days ago did I realize that it was actually a map,” writes Julien Nègre. It’s […]
Even old New York / Was once New Amsterdam / Why they changed it I can’t say / People just liked it better that way – They Might Be Giants: […]
Is there such a thing as collective guilt? Or if not that, then at least some kind of national responsibility for past state crimes? Was the Nazi period a freak of history, […]
n . n Strange Maps is partial to a nice bit of comparative geography, as demonstrated by earlier posts like #101, #131, #377 or #390. The list is non-exhaustive, and […]
. (click on the map to view it without the annoying sidebar) . Great stories are rarely isolates. Even though Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are founding epics of ancient Greece, […]
n Korea as a tiger: what a beautiful map. The peninsula’s shape is rendered in the image of the local big cat , also known as the Siberian, Manchurian or Altaic tiger (Panthera […]
. . Is spanking an acceptable way of disciplining children? . Opinions differ (1). Some consider it barbaric and a definite no-no, others think it merely old-fashioned but quite handy […]
n . n The Spanish title of Jorge Volpi’s most recent book of essays, translates as Bolivar’s Nightmare – Four untimely essays on Latin America in the 21st century. The […]