Month: January 2005

We all know the atomic bomb is dangerous. But if you boys and girls know how to duck and cover, you’ll be perfectly safe.… Read the rest

Most entertaining essay of 2004: Planes, Trains, and Plantains: The Story of Oedipus.… Read the rest

This has really gone too far: When the WSJ starts writing about how cool Moleskine notebooks are, and even BoingBoing starts drooling over the things and talking about how many bloggers love them, you know something is amiss. Really, now: Moleskines are cute, black, metrosexual notebooks with off-white paper and clever-ish folders in the back where you can stuff receipts, scraps of paper, $20 bills, sticks of nicotine gum, and the like.… Read the rest

This interesting essay in City Journal examines how classic literature — often disparaged as a “canon” of irrelevant works by long-dead white males — has in fact been profoundly liberating for more than a century of working-class autodidacts in the U.S.… Read the rest

I love it when judges smack down the fundamentalists. It happens so infrequently that it’s especially gratifying when it does happen. In this case, a judge saw through the transparent creationism lurking behind a Georgia school board’s “evolution warning stickers,” (see parodies here) and ruled that they unconstitionally crossed the line separating church and state.… Read the rest

It’s not like me to brag too much, but at the recent Vegas trade show CES, I got to party with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and American bike racing hero Lance Armstrong. OK, I didn’t actually party with them–but I did get to party *near* them, and that was pretty cool to me.… Read the rest

Gabrielle and Kenneth Adelman have been flying up and down the California coastline in a helicopter, with a Nikon D-1 digital camera and a GPS receiver. They’ve photographed almost the entire coast, and put their images online. It’s an amazing project!… Read the rest