Culture & Religion

Publishing houses are more relevant than ever in the digital era, says Ursula Mackenzie, chair of the U.K. Trade Publishers Council. And demand for print works remains very strong.

With brain scans, scientists have learned much about what happens in our heads during sleep, but they still can’t answer the simple question: why do we sleep?

“If u really r annoyed by the vocabulary of the text generation, it turns out they were doing it in the 19th century—only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever.”

While we witness the transition from paper to digital publishing, The Atlantic looks back on ten prior revolutions in literacy from hieroglyphs to Hellenic song to the printing press.

What happens to a child when Atlas Shrugged becomes a bedtime story? New satire at McSweeney’s: ‘Our daughter isn’t a selfish brat; your son just hasn’t read Atlas Shrugged’.

Praise for Edward Hopper at the Whitney: “Hopper, if provincial, is powerfully so. He sets today’s conventions, in art and elsewhere, into relief. He enriches the American darkness.”

WEIRD stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Though WEIRD people are a minority in global terms, they constitute the field of study for most psychological research.

New research once again shows that the poor are not only more generous than those wealthier and they are also more charitable, trusting and helpful.

“Disney has a long history of dress policies and is within its rights in restricting where a restaurant worker can wear a hijab,” says the L. A. Times in an editorial.

“There’s a reason we’re fighting to keep this unretouched image of Aniston on our website. And it’s not just because we like her freckles.” Jezebel on the impact of for retouching.

“The messages lost through faulty translation in Afghanistan are sabotaging the mission there as badly as any physical enemy ever could,” warns Neil Shea.

Writer and marketing guru Seth Godin is spurning traditionally published books. As Mathew Ingram notes, self-published PDFs and e-books are increasingly attracting such authors.

The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker blames the media for fearmongering over the ‘Ground Zero mosque’. “For one thing, it’s not at Ground Zero. Also, it isn’t a mosque.”

“In a Spiegel interview, Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass talks about why he doesn’t fear death and why he thinks the Brothers Grimm had ‘oral sex with vowels’.”

“I still think that in going the way it has gone, policy debate has coarsened itself.” Mark Oppenheimer at Slate laments the exaggerated competition in once-civil team sports.

The corruption of U.S. financial markets, whose CEOs habitually buy up expensive art, is mirrored by an unregulated art market where it is difficult to tell between hoax and truth.

There is a big difference between manners and good taste, says interior designer Thom Filicia, one-fifth of the Fab Five from Bravo’s popular “Queer Eye” series. Knowing what society requires […]

Yale professor David Gelernter tells Big Think that America should acknowledge its identity as a Judeo-Christian society and mandate teaching of the Bible in our public schools. America is a […]

The prolific and admired English literary critic Frank Kermode, 90, was by his own admission a failed novelist and playwright who “stumbled into academic life”, writes T. Rees Shapiro.

Director of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Haris Tarin tells of the tolerant America his late immigrant father cherished, a tolerant America that is crumbling.

In an effort to gather data and make facilities more entertaining, some museums have deployed stealth observers to document patron reactions to how exhibitions are laid out.

Our veterans are much more economically diverse than most people imagine, says Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “They’re not all broke and uneducated and from […]

“It is a widely held stereotype that children who grow up without brothers or sisters may be ‘oddballs’ or ‘misfits.’ But new research undermines that notion.” Only children adapt by their teens.

The New Yorker chronicles the artistic development of Bob Dylan parallel to his run-ins with The Beat writers in Greenwich Village, and particularly his lasting friendship with Allen Ginsberg.

America’s ability to sap its intellectuals, from Twain to King, of their true revolutionary fervor reaches an apex with Jack London. The beloved author lived a dark and revolutionary life.

While Italy is now famous for its use of the red tomato on pizzas and pastas, the food was introduced the country relatively recently. A historian on how we all came to love the tomato.

“Contrary to the Machiavellian cliché, nice people are more likely to rise to power. Then something strange happens: Authority atrophies the very talents that got them there.”

“We think of writing as an author’s cognitive output, but it has a corporeal dimension—writing is an embodied practice.” The Smart Set on the loss of novelists’ female transcriptionists.

German architect Christoph Ingenhoven says the attitude which defines modernism is against superfluous design and that many Asian cities are modernizing in all the wrong ways.

David Adamovich throws knives for a living. Really big knives. With 25 world records under his belt, Adamovich is the world’s fastest and most accurate knife thrower. He also holds […]