Culture & Religion

Portion sizes in paintings of Jesus’ last supper have grown exponentially in the last 1,000 years in a strange parallel of changing eating habits, showing that art imitates life.

Carl Varjabedian, a photographic maverick, captures the surreal beauty of the American West in a manner worthy of tall tales and American dreams, writes NPR.

Edmund White’s eloquent consideration of Cheever in the new New York Review of Books remembers the late author’s connections with Chekhov, his love/hate relationship with Catcher in the Rye, and […]

This is my 100th post on Mind Matters. Hence the cake in the pic, which was made for a wedding by Seattle’s Jet City Cakes, using H.R. Giger’s designs for […]

The New Yorker’s Jill Lapore ponders the rise of marriage therapy in America as well as other dreams of human betterment in a culture that says “Why settle for less than perfection?”

Race is a “social concept, not a scientific one” claimed geneticist J. Craig Venter following the discovery that humans share 99.9% of the same genetic code irrespective of our skin color.

Holidaymakers in Dubai were recently arrested for kissing in public and could face jail. It seems totally over the top, but should tourists respect the rules of the countries they’re in?

The unsung heroes of the art world who lift and hammer, hang and adjust, got their place in the spotlight this weekend at the first ever Art Handling Olympic championships.

As Churchill said of democracy (“the worst form of government excepting those already tried,” to paraphrase), so historians might say of marriage—or at least, marriage as conceived in the late […]

With the help of a new machine, a German computer engineer has pieced together 600 million scraps of shredded documents from the former East German Ministry for Security.

We were in the middle of a conversation around the table at a restaurant when our first year art student made a comment about her classes. “You might be a […]

The Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page wants to see at least a minimum graduation rate of 40 percent before college basketball teams are allowed to compete in post-season play.

A man for all seasons, Sam Shepard opens up about Patti Smith, his plays, his problems with alcohol and the role of love in American society in a recent interview with The Guardian.

FutureEverything last week awarded their first FutureEverything Award to The EyeWriter, a new eye-tracking technology (pictured) that allows artists to “draw” with their eyes when unable to do so with […]

The economic depression has proven a serious crisis for major film studios and in its wake Hollywood stars are flocking to Broadway to renew their acting careers.

The free music streaming service that has a library containing over ten millions songs already enjoyed by Europeans is still in negotiations with record companies but hopes to break into America in 2010.

News of a “liberal” price cut on the late William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Manhattan flat in today’s New York Times provides reason enough to remember the iconic author/editor’s brilliance. Who […]

All you need, if you’re Jules Feiffer, is a sharp stick and an even sharper satirical eye. Before he became a Putlizer Prize winner, an Academy Award winner, and one […]

Bacon has been relegated to old-hat status, despite being the “apple of food nerds’ eye for so long.” Meanwhile, America’s old-time cured country ham tantalizes taste buds and is beating bacon.

Frenchmen would love looser laws to bring back brothels more than 60 years after Paris shut its famed “maisons closes,” according to a campaign stepping up to legalize them.

The first ever openly gay female bishop has achieved the first hurdle in her bid for consecration, after winning a majority of “yes” votes by America’s Anglican church.

Rabbi Oren Hayon feels the Passover story—a tale of enslaved Israelites, pestilence and plagues— needs perking up, so he has recruited a band of rabbis to act it out on Twitter.

Irish author and actor Malachy McCourt’s memories of St. Patrick’s Day are gloomy, rainy and awful. That’s how it was in Limerick, Ireland, where he was raised. In the U.S., […]

It’s not all economics, with respect to (the aforementioned) Laureates Sen and Stiglitz. It can be as simple as finding daily rituals. Make the bed. Plant a garden. It’s a […]

The “bacterial communities” that live on human skin are now thought to form colonies on inanimate objects regularly touched by human hands, such as your computer keyboard.

“Pragmatic” is often seen as a complimentary term. But, says New York Times’ commentator Stanley Fish, it is also related to the philosophy of “pragmatism,” which is an unhopeful ideal.

After 10 years of literary detective work, new evidence has come to light of a lost play by William Shakespeare, called Cardenio, which had masqueraded as an 18th-century work.

Love. Sex. Space. Coke. (Coke?) Discretion. Indiscretion. Family. Fame. Privacy. Puppies. The Rolling Stones. One man’s happiness is, axiomatically, not another’s, and so the riddle of what brings us peace […]

A top military adviser on the newly released war thriller “Green Zone” has written an editorial slamming the film’s assertion that a massive conspiracy led us into the Iraq war.

“I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them,” remarked performance artist extraordinaire Marina Abramović in a recent profile in The New Yorker.  With a new retrospective […]