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When the 104-year-old copper heiress Huguette Clark died earlier this week, obituaries invariably included the word eccentric. This was surely due at least somewhat to her apparent preference for making her home in hospitals.
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On the western edge of Frozen Head State Park, just before dawn, a man in a rust brown trench coat blows a giant conch shell. Runners stir in their tents.
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Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”.
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The most influential and original musician of the 1960s generation remains a figure of protean creativity half a century on. The wealth of attention devoted to Bob Dylan as he reaches his 70th birthday is testament to a career of astonishing range.
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The ghost of General de Gaulle himself haunts this grey mess. It sings of French third-way-ism, flimsy viennoiseries at certain narrowings along the viper's vertebrae, sad succursales of the Hippopotamus chain at others
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At one point as I was writing my doctoral dissertation on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project I jokingly suggested to my dissertation advisor that I should leave the project unfinished, just like the Arcades Project itself
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In certain corners of the world of Super Mario 64, there are graphical glitches that turn a seemingly solid space into a splintered chaos of polygons.
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“The government’s laws and orders will be transmitted to the furthest reaches of the social order with the speed of electric fluid.” Such was the promise made by the chemist, industrialist, and minister of the interior Jean-Antoine Chaptal in 1800.
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Interns in D.C. run the gamut from completely powerless, idle kids spending a few weeks in some senator's office to people doing very substantial and important work on energy policy, pending legislation, foreign affairs and the like
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It's a wintry February afternoon in Boulder and a 53-year-old tech worker named Kyle fires up a joint he obtained from a medical marijuana dispensary.
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In 1917, Yusuf Ali Khan Salar Jung III, the melancholic prince of Hyderabad, slid into depression after losing the prime ministership of the Nizamdom.
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Herzog's original renown came from the innovative, unconventional, and often mysterious feature films he released in the '70s and early '80s
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In The Hitchhiker's Guide, Earth is demolished suddenly and unceremoniously by aliens called Vogons, who are clearing a path for a hyperspace bypass.
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In 2003 I was fresh out of college and interning at Ms. Magazine. I first saw Arianna Huffington at the magazine’s editorial offices,
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On May 18, 2002, Arturo Gatti fought Micky Ward in a ten-round nontitle bout. If that means something to you now, realize that at the time it meant very little beyond the promise of an entertaining scrap.
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The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans.
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Young artists are hungry for company, for confirmation of their talent and a sense of four walls around them, and they’re hungry for partners in their rebellion against the world.
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From Donna Summer to Dante, everybody loves a "bad girl". She is a social construct that runs the cultural gamut from classical to cartoonish and back again, wearing only high heels and a smirk.
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In Germany, there are pretty much only two categories: literature—work aspiring toward literary merit—and then just pure information, train schedules and the like.
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Imperium confronts imperium. The American entertainment company Walt Disney is building a theme park in Shanghai. Several thousand apartments and stores will be cleared away for this purpose.
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Early in my career I was immersed in the ideas of a handful of Continental thinkers, including Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, and Lévi-Strauss
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I feel like it’s possible. Those games aren’t art objects, but they came out of culture. I always assumed those graphics were influenced by pop art.
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A book is a self-contained story, argument, or body of knowledge that takes more than an hour to read. A book is complete in the sense that it contains its own beginning, middle, and end.
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The Filipino nurse was there to kill the rural Oregon politician, who was recuperating from ear surgery at the Portland hospital. She carried a syringe to inject a mixture into Comini's intravenous tube that would stop his heart.
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by Robyn Ferrell
Paintings are the moon and stars in a dark sky for Australian Aboriginal communities. The economic success of this art holds out an almost utopic prospect of a cultural renaissance. Yet poverty, violence and third-world living standards in its remote communities remain the present reality.
by Barry Mazur
I came late to the feeling that the purity of mathematical ideas had any need for story or for the temporal intrusion of personal accounts. But, I’ve changed, quite a bit.
by Cain Todd
Locating the murky distinction between pornography and erotic art has long exercised minds in many domains, philosophy amongst them. One of the chief ways in which philosophers have sought to draw the distinction is by illuminating the nature of the different types of appreciation specific and appropriate to each. 
by Maryann Corbett
A reviewer once described the writer Thomas Lynch as a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats. I’ll say more later about the Yeats genes in this hybrid cross. But the comparison with Keillor is apt: both men are big, bearded, jowly and affable in performance. 
by Jeremy Fernando
From the beginning, we knew he would not die. For, we’ve always known that Kim Jong Il is a media event. Unless you were in his inner circle, no one even knew him other than through the media. Not just in death, but right from the very start. He might well have never even been born—or been born twice; it would be exactly the same.
by Bill Benzon
It is a truth universally acknowledged that What’s Opera, Doc? is one of the finest cartoons ever made. It satirizes opera, Wagner in particular; it parodies Disney’s Fantasia, and, for that matter, it parodies the routines of its stars, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. 
by Inderjeet Parmer
“SWITZERLAND EXPOSED,” screamed the title of a book I happened to see recently, drawing a wry smile, and a feeling of “you can’t be serious!” That’s the usual response when people hear about my new research on American philanthropic foundations, which argues that they are not so “cuddly” a bunch as their image suggests.
by John Gaffney
It is the received view – a view that took root that fateful evening at Fouquet’s restaurant, the evening of his victory over his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in May 2007 – that Nicolas Sarkozy as President between 2007 and 2012 betrayed Charles de Gaulle’s République de Grandeur, replacing it with a République de ‘bling’.
by Patrick Downey
Whereas Capone was famous for being the CEO of the largest criminal enterprise in the U.S., Jack was famous for getting shot, beating the rap and carrying on a highly publicized extra-marital affair with his Ziegfeld showgirl mistress.
by Jason Dittmer
There is a great symmetry between the formal properties of comics and contemporary network ontologies prominent in the social sciences, but this symmetry needs to be explored in the literature in order to inform future research agendas in the social sciences and humanities. 
by Shuwei Fang
China shines by keeping its industrial production and service industries in perfect tandem with the technological frontier. Like the Red Queen, it runs as fast as possible in order to remain at the cusp of the global technology frontier, while not actually advancing the frontier itself.
by Meaghan Emery
Every once in a while a film comes out that breaks through conventional wisdom. The idea that a black and white silent film in 2011 could be such a resounding critical and commercial success, in addition to its prominence in international film festivals, six Césars, and now five Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best actor, best original score, and best costume design, who would have thought?
by Neil Besner
From July of 1965 to July of 2011 is, logically, chronologically, symbolically, metaphorically, imaginatively as in memory, a long time. I wouldn't presume to try to chart or map it out, save to say that one obvious temporal, textual, and above all readerly marker is pre-and post-Bishop.
by Sherwood Anderson
I am at my house in the country and it is late October. It rains. Back of my house is a forest and in front there is a road and beyond that open fields. The country is one of low hills, flattening suddenly into plains. Some twenty miles away, across the flat country, lies the huge city, Chicago. Most Popular
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| 7. | Longevity |
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