Skip to content

Search Results

You searched for: Imagin today

Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Deny Evolution If adults want to deny evolution, sure. That’s fine. Whatever. But those adults better not make their kids follow in […]
Every so often, an individual comes forward with a completely original idea that changes how we view the world, starting as if from nowhere, without relying on the gains of the past. 
If the question of life or death resides in the hands of a deity, then the death penalty is a sin against that god. Yet if it’s in our own hands, a woman deciding whether or not to bring a child forth should not be made to feel guilty, or worse, that she herself has sinned.
It’s subtle and pernicious as hell how this happens. How we transform something that’s supposed to make us more open and balanced into a shiny new prison of things, jargon, and obligations.
The attack at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, Tunisia, on March 18, 2015, was an attack on civilization itself. Not just Tunisian civilization or Western civilization or Islamic civilization or Christian civilization — ALL civilization. ISIS may not have been directly involved in the Tunisian attack, but its iconoclastic, its “year zero” philosophy certainly was present. The fact that these attackers targeted tourists seeking out ancient civilizations rather than the artifacts of those ancient civilizations makes this latest tragedy even more chilling. The Bardo National Museum attacks may one day emerge as the first battle in the ultimate fight for civilization’s survival.
When British archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered in December 1927 the tomb of Puabi, the queen/priestess of the Sumerian city of Ur during the First Dynasty of Ur more than 4,000 years ago, the story rivaled that of Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt just five years earlier. “Magnificent with jewels,” as Woolley described it, Puabi’s tomb contained the bodies of dozens of attendants killed to accompany her in the afterlife — the ideal material for a headline-grabbing PR campaign that momentarily shouldered Tut out of the spotlight. A new exhibit at New York’s The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World titled From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics puts Puabi back in the spotlight to examine how archaeology and aesthetics intersected, transforming ancient art into modern and making modern art strive to be ancient.
Romance and reason are becoming estranged bedfellows (too bad—they were a cute couple). Does love’s logic now add up? Or is love like “happiness,” a low-resolution word (unhelpful in seeing key distinctions). Food for thought on love’s unrequited logic…
Half a millennium later, you would think the Italian Renaissance could hold no more secrets from us, no “codes” to decipher. And, yet, secrets hiding in plain sight continue to startle modern audiences with the depth and breadth of that amazing era. One of the well-kept secrets, at least until now, was the work of Piero di Cosimo, subject of his first major retrospective, Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.  Called “a madman” for his personal and artistic quirks by Renaissance chronicler Giorgio Vasari, Piero’s ability to paint in multiple genres all with a dizzying amount of detail may have seemed madness to contemporaries, but appeals to modern audiences conditioned for such visual assaults. There may have been a method to Piero di Cosimo’s madness after all.
Michio Kaku: Can We Download Our Brains? One day we might be able to download our consciousness into a computer chip, preserving our personalities forever—but first we will have to […]