From the monthly archives:

September 2008

Why can’t science journalists just tell it like it is when it comes to particle physics?

Why can’t science journalists just tell it like it is when it comes to particle physics?
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg once summed up …

[read more]

America The Gift Shop

America The Gift Shop

CULTURE BUZZ –“If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell?”From photographer Phillip Toledano, a series …

[read more]

David Foster Wallace’s Class Syllabus

David Foster Wallace’s Class Syllabus

Link: http://alasophia.blogspot.com/2008/09…

The prolific writer’s recent death yields an incredible document to the internet: his college class syllabus, which appears …

[read more]

Now a charisma-sensei — lucid, affable, groomed for “The Charlie Rose Show” — is all but a tenure shoo-in, an asset no blue-chip university can be without. On TV or billboarded on the Barnes & Noble front table, the charisma-sensei is an emissary for the relevance and exuberance of the brand, be it Harvard, Yale or Chaucer. Best of all, his online lectures now might go viral, playing around the world — beyond the reach even of Charlie Rose! — alongside clips of the Chinese Olympian Qiu Jian or the Lebanese singer Fairuz in concert. What better way to prove an institution’s embrace of globalism, new technology and populist models of information dissemination?

Now a charisma-sensei — lucid, affable, groomed for “The Charlie Rose Show” — is all but a tenure shoo-in, an asset no blue-chip university can …

[read more]

190 Bowery

190 Bowery
Photographer Jay Maisel bought the building at 190 Bowery 42 years ago for $102,000. Covered by graffiti and assumed by many to have …

[read more]

He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.

He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations …

[read more]

The moods that Mr. Wallace distilled so vividly on the page — the gradations of sadness and madness embedded in the obsessive, recursive, exhausting prose style that characterized both his journalism and his fiction — crystallized an unhappy collective consciousness. And it came through most vividly in his voice. Hyperarticulate, plaintive, self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware (and nearly impossible to quote in increments smaller than a thousand words) — it was something you instantly recognized even hearing it for the first time. It was — is — the voice in your own head.

The moods that Mr. Wallace distilled so vividly on the page — the gradations of sadness and madness embedded in the obsessive, recursive, exhausting prose …

[read more]

Internet Meme Timeline

Internet Meme Timeline

Link: http://www.dipity.com/user/tatercakes…

Someone has developed a wiki-timeline of Internet memes. It’s the geekiest, and awesomest, thing ever.

Contribute: Add an image, link,……

[read more]

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →