≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
In early October, The New Yorker magazine held its eighth annual festival in NYC. (Yikes! As I am typing I’m feeling my first earthquake here in California. Apparently 5.7 on Richter scale. Details here.) Anyway, the festival brings to the stage an impressive list of writers & artists (see the full schedule here). And while [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 2 Comments
If you’re looking to build your jazz collection, this site offers some sound guidance. It features 100 top jazz CDs. Although inherently subjective, the list includes many indisputable classics that belong in any respectable jazz collection. (Note: if you click on the link for each album, you’ll find some background information that’s often worth reading.) [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Earlier this month, The New York Times Book Review launched an online Reading Room that lets readers tackle great books with the help of “an all-star cast of panelists from various backgrounds—authors, reviewers, scholars and journalists.” The first reading starts with Leo Tolstoy’s 1200+ page epic, War and Peace (1865-69), and it’s led by book [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
This sneaked up on us. Today marks the one year anniversary of our site. All in all, it’s been a decent maiden voyage. Last October, we started with the concept that the web abounds with great cultural/educational media, but no one’s really focusing on these smart podcasts/videos and providing users with a free and easy [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
At the end of another week, it’s time for another recap of the ground we covered: Our Ancestral Mind in the Modern World: An Interview with Satoshi Kanazawa (Featured on Boing Boing) Science for The Rest of Us: Podcasts At a Glance (by guest writer Elizabeth Green Musselman) Better Thinking Through Podcasts 500 Years of [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ 2 Comments
Here’s a zinger to mull over: The BBC has posted an article about a theory advanced by Oliver Curry, an “evolutionary theorist” working out of The London School of Economics, who suggests that humanity may split into two sub-species about 100,000 years down the road. And what we’d be left with is “a genetic upper [...]
≡ Category: Books, Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
It’s been an unspeakably bad week throughout much of fire-ravaged Southern California. As of Thursday, the toll looked liked this: 500,000 acres burned; 1,800 homes destroyed; 57 people injured and at least six killed. As all of this transpires, a new book has come out that gives you an inside look at firefighters who make [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
The National Book Critics Circle has a blog and they’ve asked some of the country’s best literary critics to list the “five books a critic believes reviewers should have in their libraries.” The series provides a new list every week, and so far the choices are interesting not just for the books picked (and some [...]
≡ Category: Religion, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
When debating religion, you can take the low road (e.g., Ann Coulter’s recent flirtation with anti-semitism) or the high road. Here’s Richard Dawkins, an avowed atheist and evolutionary biologist at Oxford, having a high-minded conversation about the existence (or non-existence) of God with Alister McGrath, who is Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University and [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
After we mentioned Book Mooch last week, one of our faithful readers alerted us to another site — PaperBackSwap.com. PaperBackSwap is reportedly easier to use than Book Mooch, and the actual process of exchanging books runs more smoothly. Meanwhile, despite the site’s name, you can swap both paperback and hardback books there. In case you [...]