3 Quarks Daily
This great “filter blog” edited by S. Abbas Raza collects the writings of people in the arts and sciences. If you think the world has run out of ideas, go there. Yesterday it featured an article reporting that Iranian female students have been secretly reading Nabokov’s Lolita. Habermas, Kant, Arendt, Mill, Camus are hugely popular […]
Heath Ledger: The Joker
When Heath Ledger (April 4, 1979 – January 22, 2008) died, the world lost one of its most exciting dramatic actors. In The Dark Knight he gave a chilling, spot-on performance of the Joker, a character who kills for pleasure, and said it was the role he’d had the most fun ever playing. Fun? The […]
Johnny Cash/ Odetta/ Moby: Cut you down
“God’s gonna cut you down” is a powerful traditional song. Moralistic? Hm. I first heard it sung by Odetta on a scratchy recording from the ’60s, and she made it a woman’s moral fighting song. Then Johnny Cash changed it into a song to console a poor sinner (see the video with all those stars). […]
The Walkmen
The Walkmen from New York have just made their latest album, You & Me, available in an exclusive charitable pre-release on indie music website AmieStreet.com. It costs $5 on this site, with the proceeds from each sale being donated to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. These guys definitely have something to say. If you’ve […]
Where on Earth will you vote?
Democrats Abroad sent me this motivating video. If you’re a US citizen, register here: www.votefromabroad.org.
Goodbye, red marble
I hear NASA has found water on Mars (BBC).”This is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted,” says William Boynton, mission scientist. That’s progress: Pretty marbles become habitats. Are we really gearing up to go to Mars? When my dad was a boy in the 1920s, children still thought the moon was […]
The pleasant poetry of Genesis
The 1925 trial against John Scopes for teaching the theory of evolution in Tennessee was the first U.S. trial to be broadcast on national radio and is still making waves. Today many of the states in the US require public schools to teach the creation of the world according to the book of Genesis on par with Darwin’s theory of evolution.
