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“Imagine a world without art.” This could easily have been the message greeting visitors to the Wikipedia site on January 18, 2012, when it went silent in protest against legislation proposed in Congress (Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA).
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William Shakespeare’s late tragedy Coriolanus is often seen as one of his most political plays. Set in ancient Rome, and based upon the life of the title character as written by Plutarch, the resonances with Shakespeare’s own time have often been remarked upon, especially in terms of the corn riots and resultant popular uprisings in the English Midlands around the time he wrote the play in 1607.
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In the spring of 2001, at the Conservative Party Conference in Plymouth, Margaret Thatcher made a joke. She was then seventy-five, and had been out of office for more than ten years, much of it spent as the hectoring conscience of her party. Now she told the faithful that on her way to the conference hall (that old standby of the stand-up), she had passed a cinema that was showing a film called The Mummy Returns. No, jokes were never her forte.
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Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision that could be entitled ‘Under Western Eyes’. The larger part of it consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or topic from China, but whose real frame of reference, determining the optic, is the United States.
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The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race.
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The name Rod Serling is associated with mind-bending narratives and imaginative tales of science fiction. This reputation is largely due to his magnum opus, the Twilight Zone, which has guaranteed his status in the canon of significant American television writers.
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Recently, I came upon a neat phrase to use on those people who refuse to hear the fact that there has been net emigration of central Europeans from Britain, because all the waiters in their local Pizza Express come from Warsaw: "Data is not the plural of anecdote."
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Male infertility is one of the world’s best-kept secrets. Few people realize that male infertility contributes to more than half of all cases of childlessness worldwide. In the Middle Eastern region where I work, the rates of male infertility are even higher, 60-70% of all cases, with very severe forms that are probably genetic in origin and related to consanguineous, or cousin marriage.
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Remember that scene in Amélie? Our heroine finds a forgotten box of toys hidden in her Paris apartment's bathroom wall and seeks out its former owner. Finally she learns his identity. She leaves the toys in a phone booth and calls him there as he walks by.
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I joined Facebook in September, 2007. My 'timeline', when I studied it for the last time yesterday evening, indicated very little activity until around April, 2008, at which point I, apparently, began posting frivolous status updates about my personal life, my tribulations and thoughts, roughly once a week.
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“Don’t forget,” Pierre said to me as we walked into a match at Parc des Princes this February, “‘PSG’ means ‘Pas Sûr de Gagner.’” Winning, the joke goes, is surely not a given for the home team.
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Hip hop is a fundamentally subversive genre. It has become a universal medium of social and political expression for young, dissident, and marginalized people everywhere. What Arabic hip hop has given the Arab world is a widely-accessible and unfiltered medium for disseminating revolutionary ideas.
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Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually-defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth-century who coined the word “pornography.”
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In a recent NPR piece TV critic Eric Deggans cites shows like "Hell on Wheels," Sons of Anarchy," "Dexter," and "Breaking Bad" as evidence of a proliferations of television programs featuring "characters the audience likes and wants to see succeed, even though they act an awful lot like villains."
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Last year’s short-lived reality show, succinctly entitled H8R (if you can’t decipher that idiom, you are too old to be watching the program), followed celebrities like Snooki and Kim Kardashian as they confronted people who’d said mean things about them on the internet.
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A recent piece by Scott Jaschik in “Inside Higher Education” pointed out what a number of my colleagues have been thinking for a while now: the peer review system for scholarly journals doesn’t work very well, needs to be reformed, and really ought to take radical advantage of new technologies.
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I first heard of Patti Smith in 1971, when I was seventeen. The occasion was an unsigned half-column item in the New York Flyer, a short-lived local supplement to Rolling Stone, marking the single performance of Cowboy Mouth, a play she cowrote and costarred in with Sam Shepard, and it was possibly her first appearance in the press.
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I dreamt last night that weight was bread. More precisely, I dreamt that a kilogram was a loaf of dark, rye-like, round bread, about the diameter of a steering wheel.
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Marshall McLuhan deserves to be re-evaluated as a rhetorician because he has described and demonstrated a perspective on rhetoric that remains significant. That perspective involves aesthetic, social, and cultural elements that gravitate around a mythos of (w)holistic understanding: an auditory experience, which is the evolutionary result of electronic media.
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The Jinhua caves are located in a wooded, hilly area about 200 miles southwest of Shanghai. The most famous cave, Double Dragon Cave, is entered by a stream that passes under a stone overhang just a few inches above the water.
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Late in 2010, Google Labs introduced something called the NGram Viewer, which allows users to search a database of millions of published works and discover how often particular words have been used from year to year.
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How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling: i.e. it is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of ‘exploiting’ his workers more successfully.
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by Charles LaPorte
If the Bible was best viewed as poetry, many felt, modern poetry could also come to serve a cultural role like that traditionally held by scripture. In this context, it should surprise us little to see Robert Browning addressed by his admirers as God’s very mouthpiece, or Alfred Tennyson spoken of as a veritable prophet.
by Rex Veeder
As a student of rhetoric, I was introduced to Marshall McLuhan in one or two classes during the 60s and 70s but the introduction was brief – more like having a family member introduce you to an uncle from Canada who, although he was family, somehow didn’t fit in. He was inappropriate. 
by Nico Slate
Connections between Indian and African American freedom struggles go well beyond the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The Montgomery Story comic book was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group that by the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been working for decades to translate Gandhian methods for use in the struggle for racial equality in the United States.
by Leslie Paul Thiele
We are in the midst of an extinction crisis that rivals any in the last 65 million years. And we are altering the planet’s climate. But as we begin to accept the burden of responsibility for our actions, we are also reinforcing a false image of our species. 
by Philip Kitcher
It may seem that treating ethics as a human phenomenon, as a work-in-progress, undermines its authority. Without absolute commands, is everything permitted? Why, if the ethical maxims that currently govern our lives have emerged in this way, should we obey them? To say that ethics is founded in the command of God – or the dictates of Reason, for that matter – doesn’t help. 
by Tamar Aylat-Yaguri
It would be a contradiction to claim that both man and God could be simultaneously right and just. Either God is in the wrong (and there is no theodicy) or man is in the wrong, always in the wrong, and there is theodicy. 
by Keith and Orrin Pilkey
If the vast majority of scientists believe that humans are directly contributing to climate change, then why do polls show that fewer Americans today see global warming as a serious threat than they did two years ago? This public opinion phenomenon is directly attributable to groups motivated to misinform the public. 
by Nicholas Rombes
The vague commune in Martha Marcy May Marlene exists as a sort of unfulfilled dream. As with the other Occupy Zeitgeist films, the deceptively shambling narrative structure hints at a fantasy of disorder, the disorder of the natural world in the heart of a city, a desire not to dismantle the dominant social structures, but to circumvent it altogether. 
by John Beverley
There are many, and often deep, differences among the new governments of the left in Latin America, but in my opinion they do not resolve themselves into a neat dichotomy, which has the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is an important emerging contradiction in the Pink Tide, but it is one within the governments of the Tide rather than between them. 
by Junko Kitanaka
Suicide has long been a site of conceptual struggle for psychiatrists, who have encountered resistance from lay Japanese holding on to the cultural notion of suicide as a morally positive act of self-determination, carried out at times as a protest against social injustice. 
by Jonathan Lear
On the face of it, a conception does not seem the sort of thing it is easy to lose. If we think of our life with concepts in terms of our ways of going on, categorizing and thinking about the phenomena in the world, including ourselves, then it makes sense that certain concepts might lose their viability for us, and thus fall out of use.
by James Joyce
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. Most Popular
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