Culture & Religion

Hearing Sutherland at the Met: “It was…a reminder of how an exceptional gift, carefully developed and generously used, changed the operatic landscape.”

Gawker began as a media-gossip site devoted to ‘radical Manhattanism,’ and has since morphed into a world view for the blogging generation.

“In fairy tales, ‘good’ triumphs over ‘evil,’ but how this happens isn’t simple. It’s quite common for traditional fairy tales to have complicated, even troubling, conclusions.”

Dating research shows that when we are free to choose our conversation topics we gravitate toward an easy to maintain balance that no one actually enjoys or benefits from.

“Ellington had many of the traits one associates more readily with the founders of religious orders or political movements than with lone artists absorbed in self-expression.”

“Poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no reason to think that they could be suitable objects of ‘research.'”

“Saul Bellow’s letters are to be published later this month, five years after his death. Letters to Philip Roth and Martin Amis provide a taster of the much-anticipated collection.”

Why do some thrive under stress and others fall apart? The Boston Globe takes a new look at why we choke under pressure, and what we can do about it.

“Community is built upon conversations. People like to eat, and they like to talk about it. … The new food movement is still labeled as Do It Yourself, but it’s really Do It Ourselves.”

“When we talk about the hipster, we’re talking about a cross-subcultural figure who emerges by 1999 and enjoys a narrow but robust phase of existence from 1999 to 2003.”

Many of the guests who we interview at Big Think can be described as “giants” in their fields, but this week we actually hosted our tallest guest ever.  John Amaechi, […]

J. M. Coetzee on Philip Roth’s ‘Nemesis’: “A good education, and not just for older persons: how to dig a grave, how to write, how to face death, all in one.”

“Renowned Mexican historian and journalist Enrique Krauze on how Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels revealed Latin America’s soul — and exorcised its demons.”

“‘The Social Network’…does a brilliant job dissecting the sorts of people who become stars in an information economy and a hypercompetitive, purified meritocracy.”

Greece is broke so Prime Minister George Papandreou has cut spending, raised taxes and is trying to reeducate his people and steer them away from tax evasion and corruption.

‘Waiting for Superman’, David Guggenheim’s documentary about the fissures in public education system, made Helena Andrews re-examine her privileged private education.

“A new language of pictures may be precisely what we need to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.” Wired Science looks at the power of visual thinking.

“The creator of some of the most iconoclastic and difficult works of 20th-century fiction was surprisingly conservative in his own musical tastes.”

“It’s possible to find traces of the dumb-blonde concept in the ancient world. Just like modern gentlemen, Romans valued blondness.” Slate investigates the history of blonde jokes.

“My turn-ons include nurturing, chamomile tea and doing more than my share of the housework. I have forsaken red meat for soy.” John Keilman is the New Man.

“In piecing together a life story, the mind nudges moral lapses back in time and shunts good deeds forward, these new studies suggest—creating, in effect, a doctored autobiography.”

“Fiction has helped humanity survive. Even though science can explain the need of fiction, it cannot replace it.”

Nate Anderson looks at the “legal blackmail” business, a pornographer who decided to take revenge on pirates and the backlash and legal changes it provoked.

“As morality merges with management, a servile readiness to fit thought and conduct to what is politically correct becomes the passport for continuing dependence on…an intrusive state.”

Can teachers do much to remedy poor academic performance that is due to low IQ, poor health, peer-group pressures, a bad family environment, or the effects of popular culture?

“What is it about the presumptuous use of ‘we’ that inspires so much outrage, facetious or otherwise?” Ben Zimmer on the contentious use of the plural subject pronoun.

“Part of our current malaise is sheer fatigue with the old forms of politics. Can the Comedy Central duo break the mold?” The Guardian on Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.

No one knows monsters better than Guillermo del Toro. The director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the “Hellboy” franchise is renowned for creating fantastical beasts like the terrifying Pale Man, with […]

“Casino-resort developer Steve Wynn is betting big on the art market this fall. Mr. Wynn has enlisted Christie’s to auction off a Roy Lichtenstein painting for at least $40 million.”

“Time and opportunities have created a new breed of so-called ‘feminist’ artists. Intelligent Life’s Jessica Machado talks to a few de facto practitioners.”