Miniver Cheevy

Having warned us about Peak Oil, James Howard Kunstler now also declares Peak Suburbia. It is not an accident that the housing bubble coinci...

Jim Henley asks what superhero stories are for, and has a good answer. If science fiction is the literature of ideas, the superhero story ...

Gene Roddenberry was the creator and producer of Star Trek . In Harlan Ellison’s fascinating book-length diatribe about his feud wi...

In honour of San Francisco Pride weekend, a few words about Vito Russo. Russo was an important gay rights activist and a cinephile best ...

Science proves that my birthday is the happiest day of the year.

One of my readers has informed me about the Mr Lee Cat-cam. Sometimes I have some challenging ideas, or crazy like some other people would...

Find out what your drink says about you.

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu. Sumer is i-cumin in, Lhude sing, cuccu! Groweth sed and bloweth med And s...

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings points us to an American Enterprise Institute paper by Yegor Gaidar on why the Soviet Union collapsed. Summarizi...

Everybody's talking about how gawdawful Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is. Which it truly, profoundly is. Even the line li...

Bram Cohen, the father of BitTorrent, occasionally ruminates on his LiveJournal in a lively, geeky way about subjects like trust and secu...

Earl Boykins at emo + beer = busted career blogs a series of infographics about music albums and shows he reviews. Though I should say that...

Glenn Greenwald is a strong, brave man. I spent the day yesterday and today reading every Tom Friedman column beginning in mid-2002 throug...

Oscar Pistorius is a champion runner. Pistorius handily won the 100 and 200 meters .... his victories came decisively and kept him ai...

I have a stack of YouTube clips to restore your faith in popular culture. First, there's Stevie Wonder doing “Superstition” live on S...

A friend passes along a catalogue listing which offers a cornucopia of crackpottery. This sentence from it is truly magnificent: The Miracu...

When I was in college I read Richard Rhodes' dazzling The Making of the Atomic Bomb , and I was fascinated by the eccentric Hungarian ph...

The LOLcats meme and its variations is running amok. From a whole phiLOLsophers collection. Many of 'em are pretty damned obscure, i...

Ezra Klein has been reading Seventeen . In a finely conceived piece on “Dating Dares,” the wise and forward-thinking Elisa Benson of Seve...

Via Rivet Pep Squad: Robert Wright writing for Time magazine in 1995 describes the problems of suburbanization in The Evolution of Despair...

Some years ago, Mr Thomas Scoville created the Silicon Valley Tarot, primarily as a satire of the culture of the industry ... but it's ...

Alberto Alesina and Andrea Ichino, in the pages of the Financial Times , make a surprising but sensible social-democrat-ish recommendation: ...

Are zombie comedies now a genre?

I cannot explain why I find this so very entertaining. Are you Mr Guy Dubord?

Bruce Wallace of the Los Angeles Times describes having his bicycle stolen in Japan. My bicycle was available [to be stolen] because I ne...

Bill O'Reilly accidentally tells too much truth in an interview with Sen. John McCain. But do you understand ... what The New York Tim...

I've had Tarot on the brain lately for some reason, and so stumbled across the Sol Invictus Tarot, which features portraits of male dei...

Like a lot of people, I've been charmed by Google Maps Street View, which allows you to dive into a map to see panoramic photographs ta...

There are big holes in Mars. They're dark, and round, and nobody knows what's in 'em. Really. We send cute robots to Mars. We...

In case you missed it, Joss Whedon is upset. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and ...