How does morality develop? We often hear that children can distinguish between moral and conventional rules at the age of 2 1/2 – 3. But how does this happen? How does one learn the difference?
Read MoreUniversity College London occupation, 2010 by Owen Hatherley Sometimes, the self-referential, apolitical worlds of art and architecture intersect with politics in unexpected ways. One such telling cross-over took place during the winter’s student protests; on the same day as the 30 November demonstration across central London, there was a story in the local and architectural press that,…
Read MorePoints of Entry, Persuasive Games, 2007 From Columbia Journalism Review: In the summer of 2007, one of the hottest debates in America centered on immigration. Every pundit and politico had an opinion on the merit-based system proposed in the McCain-Kennedy Bill, either criticizing its rejection of family ties or heralding its standardization of the path…
Read MoreEine DuBarry von Heute, Alexander Korda, 1926 by David B. Clarke The cinema has never shone except by pure seduction, by the pure vibrancy of non-sense – a hot shimmering that is all the more beautiful from having come from the cold. – Baudrillard (1990a, 96) 1. Réalité Vérité Until a difference exists, how can an…
Read MoreCloning represents a turning point in human history—the crossing of an important line separating sexual from asexual reproduction and the first step toward genetic control over the next generation. —Leon Kass, chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, 2002 There is, therefore, only one principle in Islam, one principle that is not one, but…
Read MoreToday the Internet is in fact doing what the most grandiose claims about the book maintained that that humble object could do: duplicate the world, provide a perfect reflection of the order of nature…
Read MoreFrom Paper Monument: Several years ago, at an after party for an art opening, a mutual friend introduced me to one of the editors of this publication. Hearing that I was a writer, he asked whether I’d like to pitch something to his magazine, which at that point was still in its early planning stages.…
Read MoreFirebird, Ballerina, Léon Bakst, 1910 From The New York Review of Books: In the 1930s, when he was trying to establish American ballet, Lincoln Kirstein complained that “balletrusse” was one word. Successor companies to the defunct Franco-Russian Ballets Russes, cashing in on its name and legend, were spreading themselves across the globe. Perhaps today in…
Read MoreFrom Fine Books: Kapow! Comic books are no longer just kiddy lit. Far from it. The numbers speak for themselves. In March 2010, Action Comics #1—the first appearance of Superman—sold for $1.5 million on an online auction site, making it the most expensive and valuable comic book of all time. Batman’s first solo title, Detective…
Read MoreFrom Triple Canopy: It was 9:02 in the morning a few Septembers ago that an email was sent to my college alumni account, which in some years I hadn’t used for forwarding. It’s taken me this time, I’m afraid, to arrange what further will follow. Dear user You received this message because your profile is…
Read Moreby Michael Gardiner Eng Lit (English Literature), as a discipline of study and textual circulation, is not English. On the contrary, English Literature is a thoroughly British discipline – in a sense the cultural form of the British state – and its greatest period of blossoming was during the Pax Britannica of the 1810s…
Read MoreDeadly Premonition, Twin Peaks and Cult Fandom by Nate Garrelts When it was released in the United States and Japan during the Spring of 2010, the game Deadly Premonition (Xbox360) received a disparate set of reviews. Notable among these were those featured on two popular game sites, IGN and Destructoid. The IGN review written by…
Read MoreVertumnus, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1590-1591 From The Smart Set: We fill absences. This is what we do. Nature has her way of filling up absence with stars, atoms, frogs, dirt, human beings. Human beings, though, have their own curious way of filling absence. When we lived in caves, we filled the vacuum of the unknown with…
Read MoreFrom Wired: Competitive programming may strike you as history’s worst idea for a sport—shuffleboard minus the bracing speed, the Scripps National Spelling Bee without the adorableness. In fact, battle-coding is a surprisingly popular global pastime, indulged in by thousands of high-school and middle-school programming clubs and turbocharged by websites like TopCoder, a sort of social…
Read MoreAdrián Sánchez Galque, Mulatos de Esmeraldas, 1599 by Tace M. Hedrick Afro-latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812, by Kathryn Joy McKnight, Leo Garofalo, (eds), Indianapolis: Hackett, 377 pp. Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies, by Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Agustín Laó-Montes, (eds), Lanham: Lexington Books, 420 pp. Although a discussion of book…
Read Moreby F. Scott Fitzgerald I. John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades—a small town on the Mississippi River—for several generations. John’s father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known “from hot-box to hot-bed,” as the local phrase went, for her…
Read MoreChadwick Matlin’s rough taxonomy of the new slideshow economy: The Gallery The Listicle The Countdown The Timeline The Aggregator The Sex Show The Essay From Colombia Journalism Review: In May 2009, Thebigmoney.com was shouting into the void. Slate’s business site was eight months old, but it was still averaging only 50,000 page views a…
Read MorePikmin, Nintendo, 2001 by Daniel Ashton and James Newman Videogame walkthroughs provide instructions on various elements of gameplay in relation to specific digital games, and exist as text-based documents and, to a lesser extent, as recorded moving image game footage. We focus here on written-walkthroughs for the purposes of depth, while recognising the specific and…
Read MoreFrom The American Scholar: Shortly after my book Oprah: A Biography was published last April, one of Oprah Winfrey’s open-minded fans wrote to her website saying she wanted to read the book. Oprah’s message-board moderator hurled a thunderbolt in response: “This book is an unauthorized biography.” The word unauthorized clanged on the screen like a…
Read Moreby Geertjan de Vugt Between 1751 and 1772 Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert published their Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raissoné des sciences, des arts et des metiers. The work, of which the Discours Préliminaire des Éditeurs could be seen as the programmatic outline, is nowadays often regarded as one of the monuments of European…
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