Culture & Religion
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Mark Twain asked that his biography not be published until 100 years after his death. “He was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book,” says its publisher.
Should the next generation learn Chinese? “Despite China’s rise, Chinese isn’t the world language of the future; the writing system simply makes it far too hard,” says Robert Green.
Though nearly every university has a women’s studies department, the lack of men’s studies in a time of declining male performance is an issue some professors are confronting.
What moves the world and its institutions are highly changeable emotions of groups of individuals, not rational decision making, says author and sociologist John Casti.
In an exhibition currently at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, a crane reaches into a mountain of clothes and pulls out at random a selection of shirts, […]
New York’s excerpt of literary agent Bill Clegg’s memoir has the rush and pull of Jay McInernery’s Bright Lights, Big City. McInerney was celebrated for placing his action in the […]
Salon.com explains the unintended moral messages we should have taken from the fate of Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the rest of the cast on last night’s series finale of Lost.
Stephen Fry will select the most beautiful tweet ever written at the Guardian Hay literature festival in England in keeping with the festival’s non-elitist approach.
Attempts to demonstrate Picasso’s communist ties through his art are unnecessary since the painter was overt about his politics, writes the Guardian, and doing so limits the scope of his works.
Can investment in the arts be justified as a solution to the economic crisis? No, writes Prospect Magazine, and the illusion that it can or should devalues the arts’ role in society.
Photographer Ansel Adams claimed that the goal of his art was “to rekindle an appreciation of the marvelous.” Ansel Adams: Eloquent Light at the Amon Carter Museum rekindles the marvelous […]
“It is no longer a smart social move to brag about not owning a television,” writes Richard Beck. He says the small screen has gone from popular entertainment to popular art.
100 years after Mark Twain’s death, the Mississippi River that inspired his mature writing has changed, and yet, Twain’s ideas remain discernible through it.
In 1504 no less a historic name than Niccolo Machiavelli, author of The Prince, brought together the two greatest artists of the time to decorate the walls of the Great […]
Research completed by The Journal for Advertising suggests Americans have become increasingly self-confident and individualistic in the last three decades.
Corey Robin at The Nation likens the late Ayn Rand’s continued success in America to the same misguided and lazy analysis that has made Glenn Beck a popular voice.
Hollywood’s depiction of events like the war in Iraq, the global financial crisis and religious extremism are taking center stage at the Cannes Film Festival; here is the NYT review.
In a rare affront to tradition, civil servants in one Japanese region will soon be required to shave their beard after complaints were registered over the powerful facial hair.
The Impressionists now stand as the ultimate in artistic comfort food for the mainstream public. The billowy softness of their images graces office walls in framed reproductions and countless calendars. […]
Caitlin Flanagan’s essay, Love Actually, in the new Atlantic, reminds us why mothers and daughters find adolescence uniquely challenging. A girl becomes a woman, and yet her relationship to that […]
He is serving a life sentence in a Parisian prison and considered an icon of a bygone Cold War-era type of terrorism. So you wouldn’t expect to hear much from Ilich […]
New York psychotherapist Charley Wininger recalls that “hippidom (at its best) was an alternative to this dillusional pathology of separation that has been forced upon us.”
There’s hardly a feat of industrial design more emblematic of consumerism than the vending machine. But while vending machines may perpetuate a number of social ills – from conspiculous consumption […]
2010 marks the 40th anniversary of the Boston Women’s Health Collective, also known as “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” Executive Director Judy Norsigian sat down with Big Think to talk about the […]
The blank slate of pop music welcomes entertainers flashy, materialistic and audacious enough to sing endlessly without really singing about anything; pop music, thy name is Ga Ga.
From Paper Monument, British culture is observed by an American writer as a reflection of his own; in both cases he sees a cultural facade papering over Empires fallen and falling.
Chess makes for strange bed fellows. Last night at a party at the Trump SoHo hotel in downtown Manhattan, two former world chess champions, Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov, put […]
I’m no TV critic. My best TV watching days were over twenty years ago. But a slot on my blog here might as well be reserved for my weekly thoughts […]
Adam Thirwell writes that despite all the geographical accidents to have befallen Central Europe, a cogent literature can still be defined and it turns out to be of very high quality.
An L.A. Times editorial argues that Major League Baseball should move its All Star game out of Phoenix in protest against Arizona’s new immigration law.