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by Mike Hale, New York Times
Grant made more than 50 movies as a leading man, but the only thing that ties them together is that they starred Cary Grant, playing some version of his man-of-the-world persona, or of himself, which seemed to amount to the same thing. Tweet
by Michael Pollan, New York Times
How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking. Tweet
by Fred Bortz, Seattle Times
Two new books, "Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain" and "The Anatomy of Evil," try to explain the methods and motivations at the base of evil and human cruelty. Tweet
by Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman , Scientific American
Why thinking about distant things can make us more creative. Tweet
by Kim Severson, New York Times
When the director Nora Ephron began shooting a pivotal scene in her new movie “Julie & Julia,” it quickly became clear that the sole meunière might become her food stylist’s Waterloo. Tweet
by Tom Shone, More Intelligent Life
It may seem a little impertinent to gauge the literary merits of sobriety—you cannot write books of any discernible quality if you are dead—but clearly, sobering up is one of the more devastating acts of literary criticism an author can face. Tweet
by Howard Rheingold, San Francisco Chronicle
The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming." Tweet
by Nicolai Ouroussoff, New York Times
It has been nearly eight years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the fears and anxieties they gave rise to continue to take a toll on the design of public buildings. Even the words “United States,” it seems — when spelled out in the wrong size and color — can be an unacceptable security risk. Tweet
by Emily Nussbaum, New York
Madonna has returned to New York. This makes a strange kind of sense. Tweet
by Juliet Lapidos, Slate
The origins of the catastrophic cliché. Tweet
by Joseph J. Capista, Slate Tweet
by Rae Armantrout, New Yorker Tweet
by Joshua Ferris, New Yorker Tweet
by C. K. Williams, New Yorker
Face powder, gunpowder, talcum of anthrax,
shavings of steel, crematoria ash, chips
of crumbling poetry paper—all these in my lockbox,
and dust, tanks, tempests, temples of dust. Tweet
by Frank Rich, New York Times
If he was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he “loved a good story” or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank. Tweet
by Michael Winerip, New York Times
The science gets better, but life remains inscrutable. Tweet
by Jennifer Schussler, New York Times
When Frank McCourt died last weekend at age 78, we were momentarily transported, it seemed, to a more innocent age of the American memoir. Tweet
by Charles P. Pierce, Boston Globe
A bucket list doesn't have to be epic to give you a fresh perspective. I've got just the proof. Tweet
by Meghan Gibbons, Washington Post
On land, I can brag about my athletic prowess. In the water, I have to prove it. Tweet
by Ed Park, New York Times
Novelists have long tucked made-up fictions inside their real ones. Tweet
by Steven Levy, Wired
As the CEO of MeetUp, Scott Heiferman usually spends his days meeting with staff and brainstorming product strategy. But today the 37-year-old New Yorker, wearing a combat helmet and armored vest over a black business suit, is crammed into a battered C-130 transport plane headed for Iraq. Military and diplomatic personnel aboard are warily eyeing him and the others in his party, all similarly attired, as the C-130 begins its steep, corkscrew descent into the Baghdad airport. And Heiferman is thinking, "What am I doing here?" Tweet
by Holland Cotter, New York Times
If you were a preteenager in the 1950s and had precocious friends or a with-it dad, it’s a good bet you knew the cartoons of Basil Wolverton, the Michelangelo of Mad magazine, even if you didn’t know his name. Tweet
by Peter F. MacNeilage, Lesley J. Rogers and Giorgio Vallortigara, Scientific American
The division of labor by the two cerebral hemispheres—once thought to be uniquely human—predates us by half a billion years. Speech, right-handedness, facial recognition and the processing of spatial relations can be traced to brain asymmetries in early vertebrates. Tweet
by David Hagedorn, The Washington Post
Take the lid off the Weber, throw some briquettes in the chimney starter and light them up. It's time for a . . . clambake? Tweet
by Ewan Morrison,
It was once the case that to have your death celebrated by the media you had to have been a person who lived and died for their beliefs, or at least perished with those beliefs intact: a shining example to us all on the importance of steadfast convictions. One thinks of Ghandi, Jean-Paul Sartre, JFK, Martin Luther King or even Ayatollah Khomieni. In the last few years — due to the media’s requirement for such spectacles even when the substance is lacking — the death of lesser figures who stumbled blindly through life lacking all conviction has created comparable hysteria. In fact, it may even be that these figures-of-no-qualities have eclipsed the great believers in terms of attention. All of this was predicted a decade before by my old friend, the bedsit philosopher, it was a process he termed ‘the levelling of society to the lowest order.’ He saw in it ‘the ironic revenge of the plebs, the rise of the nobodies.’ Tweet
by Erica Ehrenberg, Slate Magazine Tweet
by Jarrett Wrisley, The Atlantic
As we picked apart our chicken, wrapping it in bubbled sections of bread and dipping those in cool yogurt, the restaurant brimmed with finger-licking customers. Noisy drinkers and wandering tourists spilled out onto Colaba's narrow streets, from the Gokul Bar and Café Mondegar.
And the sailors all agreed that their curry tasted just the same. Tweet
by Raul A. Reyes, Salon
I'm not an orderly, but I play one on TV. Until September, that is, when daytime's first soap goes off the air. Tweet
by Tom Vanderbilt, Slate Magazine
Why American drivers should learn to love the roundabout. Tweet
by Troy Jollimore, New Yorker Tweet
by Kirstin Valdez Quade, New Yorker
This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus. The hermanos have been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station. People are saying that Amadeo is the best Jesus they’ve had in years, maybe the best since Manuel García. Tweet
by Clive James, New Yorker Tweet
by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker
Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence. Tweet
by Laura Miller, Salon
Resistance to mind-altering substances is futile, according to a new "Secret History of Getting High in America" Tweet
by James Trefil, Harold Morowitz, Eric Smith, American Scientist
As we see it, the early steps on the way to life are an inevitable, incremental result of the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics operating under the conditions that existed on the early Earth, a result that can be understood in terms of known (or at least knowable) laws of nature. As such, the early stages in the emergence of life are no more surprising, no more accidental, than water flowing downhill. Tweet
by Frank Bruni, New York Times
This elevation of what was once considered junk food to the subject of vigorous aesthetic analysis represents the convergence of two trend lines. The first is many Americans’ growing sophistication about, and fascination with, what’s for dinner (or breakfast or lunch): the variety of it; the vocabulary for it; where to buy the best this; how to cook the best that. More and more people seem to insist on deliciousness, and more and more seem to have readily articulated opinions to go along with that demand.
But they’re bumping up against a troubled economy and budgets with stricter limits. For food lovers and for the periodicals, newscasts and blogs that serve them (and are themselves cash-strapped), what’s the solution? Tweet
by Daniel Engber, Slate
Masturbation in the animal kingdom. Tweet
by Frank Bruni, New York Times
Maybe not baby — toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn’t so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I was a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they’d never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted whenever I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up. Tweet
by Tyler Cowen, The Chronicle Of Higher Education
It turns out that the American university is an environment especially conducive to autistics. Tweet
by Aram Saroyan, Poetry Foundation
What did we learn from Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg? Tweet
by Jason Kottke
If you opt not to destroy your copy of IJ, you should use the three bookmark method. Tweet
by Juliet Lapidos, Slate Magazine
I read the banned Catcher in the Rye "sequel" so you don't have to. Tweet
by Aaron Traister, Salon
Am I the only person who actually enjoys being hitched these days? Tweet
by David Segal, New York Times
Kronos is the perfect place to pose a couple of questions that seem as if they should have been answered many hurried lunches ago: What are gyros anyway, and who made them a ubiquitous feature of Greek menus across the United States? Tweet
by Roger Ebert's Journal
I have no way of knowing Robert McNamara's thoughts in his final days. He might have reflected on his agreement to speak openly to Errol Morris in the extraordinary documentary "The Fog of War." His reflections are almost without precedent among modern statesmen and those involved in waging war. Remembered as the architect of the war in Vietnam, he doesn't quite apologize for not having done more to end that war--although he clearly wishes he had. His purpose in the film is to speak of his philosophy of life, to add depth to history's one-dimensional portrait. Don't we all want to do that? Tweet
by Tom Perrotta , Weekly Standard
Wimbledon's lawns are once again tennis's premier surface. Tweet
by Sophie Cabot Black, Slate Magazine
Once he lies down, he says, he is afraid
There is no getting back up. Maybe
It will be that nothing ever Tweet
by Dennis Overbye, New York Times
If we learned anything at all from Apollo, it was just how hard and expensive and dangerous it would be to cross space in rockets. We didn’t conquer space that July day 40 years ago. We only thought we did. Tweet
by Joe Coscarelli, Salon
One giant book, 92 days, thousands of readers -- and the world's most ambitious reading group. Tweet
by Ian Crouch, The New York Review Of Ideas
Sean Shesgreen fires a shot at the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Tweet
by William Styron, New Yorker Tweet
by Meghan O’Rourke, New Yorker Tweet
by Donald Hall, New Yorker Tweet
by John Colapinto, New Yorker
Senator Franken’s long journey. Tweet
by Brian Doherty, Reason
Is floating the last, best hope for liberty? Tweet
by Jordan Hruska, New York Times
Guttural charges from powerboats headed in our direction suggested that more of the hungry were en route from the Chesapeake Bay, where the calm, wobbling eddies were flashing with the day’s last rays of sun just beyond where I sat. Several larger groups of diners grabbed bottles of cheap beer from aluminum buckets and fried seafood from red plastic baskets. Nearby, in what looked like a modified gazebo, a rock band began its sound check. Tweet
by Jonah Lehrer, New York Times
While modern life is full of tools that keep us from straying off course, from Google maps to the iPhone, Ellard sees the need for such contrivances as a sign that we’ve already lost our way. We’ve become hopelessly disconnected from our setting, burdened with a brain that needs a GPS satellite just to get across town. Tweet
by Kim Gek Lin Short, Drunken Boat Tweet
by Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong, Drunken Boat Tweet
by Jesse Huffman, New York Times
To the uninitiated, the scene on a recent morning along the St. Lawrence River in Montreal might have inspired confusion. Behind the striking modular apartment complex known as Habitat 67, a crowd of surfers slipped into wet suits and waxed up their boards, 500 miles from the nearest ocean beach. Tweet
by Sharon Begley, Newsweek
When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and lightness" and "breathtaking" beauty. In France, papers praised the "immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Boroditsky thinks not. Tweet
by David Brooks, New York Times
Americans still admire dignity. But the word has become unmoored from any larger set of rules or ethical system. Tweet
by Janet Maslin, New York Times
William Herschel, the German-born, star-gazing musician who effectively doubled the size of the solar system with a single discovery in 1781, was not regarded as a scientist. That word had not been coined during most of the era that will now be known, thanks to Richard Holmes’s amazingly ambitious, buoyant new fusion of history, art, science, philosophy and biography, as “The Age of Wonder.” And Mr. Holmes’s excitement at fusing long-familiar events and personages into something startlingly new is not unlike the exuberance of the age that animates his groundbreaking book. Tweet
by Joshua Romero, IEEE Spectrum
We’re now on the cusp of another revolution in Mars exploration, where public outreach and scientific investigation will go hand in hand. Increasingly sophisticated imaging systems will allow robots to transmit not just individual photos but also enough data to create huge panoramas and virtual environments for anyone to explore. The sheer amount of information will require and reward more human scrutiny than professionals alone can provide. NASA is also learning, if a bit haphazardly, how to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to make missions interactive. Directly connecting with constituents in this way will be no easy task, but it’s NASA’s best opportunity to create a sustainable future for the space program. Tweet
by John Branch, New York Times
A lobectomy cured ultra-runner Diane Van Deren’s epileptic seizures, but left her with an inability to remember exactly where she is going or how to get back. Tweet
by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, New Statesman
After all the arguments for subordinating women have been shown to be self-serving lies, what are misogynists left with? They have only one feeble argument that is still deferred to and shown undeserving respect across the world, even by people who should know better: “God told me to. I have to treat women as lesser beings, because it is inscribed in my Holy Book.” Tweet
by Stephen King, Esquire Tweet
by Laura Jacobs, Vanity Fair
The making of the cultural phenomenon that was Julia Child had three key ingredients: a man, a meal, and a TV camera. Tweet
by Billy Collins, Slate Magazine Tweet
by Dan Vergano, Air & Space
Diagnosis: Collective Panic Attack. Cause: Count von Zeppelin. Tweet
by Kate Munning, Bookslut
When did people start replacing Campbell's soup with organic chicken stock and supermarket iceberg lettuce with locally grown arugula? Everyone cares about their food all of a sudden. It's partly a fad, sure, but many expected it to burn out when our nation's recession became official and the typical upper-middle-class locavore found herself with a lot less pocket money than she was used to in those carefree, pre-bailout heydays. And yet the trend persists, fueled in part by tainted spinach, peanut butter, beef, and our government's inability to trace and control these outbreaks. Food safety is certainly part of the equation, but it doesn't entirely explain why we still bum rush Whole Foods on the weekends. Tweet
by Grady Hendrix, Slate
Chinese people watch good movies in which people shoot one another with crossbows, not the miserable art-house fare that gets exported. Tweet
by Frank Bures, World Hum
There may be no more easy discoveries. There may be no more cheap epiphanies. But that doesn’t mean that discoveries and epiphanies are no longer possible, if you’re willing to look a little deeper. Tweet
by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
I'm not against things that are useless. Hell, I'm useless. I'm against things that are worse than useless. Tweet
by Daniel Gross, New York Times
In the interest of understanding our suddenly imperiled passion for private jets and $5,000 handbags, I recently dusted off — literally — one of those classics, Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class,” published in 1899. Tweet
by Joseph Ridgwell, 3:AM Magazine Tweet
by Sheilla Jones, Literary Review of Canada
What would it take to produce another Einstein? That is a question that returns with cyclical regularity in the physics community. But there is no need for the world to wait for someone of Albert Einstein’s remarkable vision and achievement to just happen along, not when we have got an Einstein factory right here in Canada. Tweet
by David Foster Wallace, Esquire
What happens when all of a man’s intelligence and athleticism is focused on placing a fuzzy yellow ball where his opponent is not? An obsessive inquiry (with footnotes), into the physics and metaphysics of tennis. Tweet
by Jamais Cascio, The Atlantic
Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter? Tweet
by Arthur Phillips, The Believer
A meditation on possibly futile artistic pursuits. Tweet
by Blake Butler, HTMLGIANT
I’ve heard / been asked a lot about the concept of ‘heart’ lately, and last night I couldn’t sleep. Tweet
by Louisa Thomas, New York Times
Kay Ryan has lived in the same small house on a hill in Marin County, Calif., for 30 years. She shingled the exterior walls and covered the steps and walkways in bright tile scraps herself. The house suits her—filled with artwork by friends and with books, surrounded by mountain-biking trails, sheltered by plants. She likes being in this out-of-the-way place, keeping her distance. As she settles into a faded pink director's chair, chatting amiably, her hazel eyes are warm but a little guarded. This is what she had dreaded when she agreed to become the poet laureate of the United States—that a reporter would show up at her door and ask her to hold forth on the State of American Poetry for the Masses. But Ryan is a kind and generous person, and so she has sliced lime for this interloper's sparkling water, offered her cut cantaloupe, and invited her onto the tiny deck lined with low-hanging strawberries, a geranium, lemon verbena, cacti. The pots were planted by Carol Adair, Ryan's spouse and longtime partner, who died of cancer in January. Ryan is doing her best to keep the plants alive, to halt the geranium's browning. Tweet
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