In this recent article, Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout considers the political conversion of playwright David Mamet, author of such celebrated plays as American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna. Let me refresh your memory. About two years ago, longtime liberal Mamet wrote an article for the Village Voice excoriating his erstwhile “brain-dead” [...]
Before I was born my father was a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. We had all kinds of stuff around the house that he “borrowed” while he was on surveys and never gave back — flashlights, tents, sleeping bags, instruments. Also, he still had friends at the Museum, so whenever we visited [...]
“I began the work by visiting a rubber plant in India and an iceberg lettuce farm in Arizona. Then I designed a telekinetic machine.” Video artist Mika Rottenberg on her recent work, Squeeze. The New York Times has discontinued it’s humor blog, “a function of the reality of limited resources in a medium where any [...]
When I heard about Mel Gibson’s new bigoted rant, it got me thinking about his old bigoted rants, and pretty soon I was thinking about rants in general, which finally made me think of Shakespeare. You probably know that Gibson starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet back in 1990. To promote the film Gibson also made [...]
In romance, do opposites really attract? Nah. Journalist David McRaney has been reading the research. Not only are you more likely to be attracted to and marry people of the same culture, religion and status, but you’ll probably stick by them in the long run. Why? Well, People who are more like you are more [...]
There’s an upcoming show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Alexander Calder’s influence on sculpture (inset: Nathan Carter, Traveling Language Machine with #3 Frequency Disruptor and Disinformation Numbers Station, 2007). Did you know that Calder once designed costumes for radio plays? Yes, I said costumes. Conjurer James Randi has spent 1 hour and 44 [...]
Yesterday I caught an interesting NPR interview in which Neil Conan interviewed journalist Kathryn Schulz about her new book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Isn’t that a cracking good subtitle? I think so too. Schulz focuses in part on the curious phenomenon that many of the truths we adhere to most passionately [...]
The other day in The New York Times, Pew Research Center president Andrew Kohut observed that Americans tend to have unreasonable ideas about technological fixes. In the 1990′s, for instance, more folks expected a cure for cancer than a terrorist attack. “Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve [...]
I’m obsessed with the live feed of the BP oil spill 5,000 feet below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico, where no human can swim and no unmediated eye can see. It’s not weirdly beautiful, like the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, but it’s way more compelling as a visual experience. A highly inaccessible environment has [...]
Below, a page from Antonin Artaud’s notebook, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. “The drawings constitute a countervailing centripetal force: their outlines, pointed up by cross-hatching and striation, double back upon themselves; the marks thicken, darken, take on a coal-like quality from the pencil lead being crushed into the paper; rubbings-out proliferate …” “Our affinities with [...]
Norm Geras points us to an article in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald by Raj Patel about what’s wrong with America these days, which turns out to be the same thing that’s always been wrong with it — America. Confused? According to Patel, it all began long ago … The rot has been there since the [...]
Check out the photography of Montreal artist Adad Hannah. Inset: All is Vanity, 2009. Does intellectual life at Princeton suck? One student wonders. “We do not demand satisfactory defenses from the people that we disagree with, and we do not challenge them, for fear of offending them. We do not take risks …” (h/t Margaret [...]
The Journal of Neuroscience has published a Cambridge study in which an MRI was used to scan the brains of gamblers as they played. Some details: During the experiment, volunteers used an onscreen slot machine with two spinning wheels of icons. When the two icons matched, the volunteer won about 75 cents, and the brain’s [...]
The good folks at the Illinois Humanities Council pass along this collection of the best author-vs-author insults in history. Below, I offer metacommentary. Mark Twain on Jane Austen: Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone. Yet the words “every time” [...]
Here’s a question. Economist Bryan Caplan is in the midst of completing a book entitled Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. He’s trying to decide whether or not to cut a potentially controversial passage on cloning from the manuscript. Here’s the paragraph: I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally. Not only do they insult [...]
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