Books are meant for reading

Planning on listening to your next book? You might be missing out on some of the details that only print can provide.

Embarrasment for the pecksniffs, schadenfreude for the good guys

The MPAA wants you to believe that file-sharing is putting Joe Average out of work - you've seen the commercials. In the mean time, they've been making unauthorized copies of Joe Average's movies.

Are rats laughing at us?

Animal Personality, a burgeoning psychological school, subscribes to the theory that animals, like humans, are born with innate character traits, which are either magnified or diminished by their formative experiences.

Pet owners across the country, no doubt, greeted this news with a resounding “Duh.”

McDonald's tomatoes

Criticizing McDonald’s for turning a blind eye on the human rights abuses, Student/Farmworker Alliance urges the corporation to use its clout to fight the exploitation of agricultural workers.

Watching movies on the Web, the crime of Technology

The art amateur is no longer taking the time to appreciate the work of art. You can put millions of mp3s onto your Ipod but how many of them will you really perceive and assess?

War games

For a virtual solider, injuries are nothing more than a small puff of blood.

The bells and whistles of New York Fashion Week

Lets see if the actual fashion on parade can speak for itself

Mirror Neurons Revisited: The Theory of Mindblindness

When scientists discovered the MNs formed what writer Sharon Begley calls the “neural basis of empathy," (How Mirror Neurons Help Us) theorists made a conceptual leap. Could hypersensitive people, like artists and depressives, have a surfeit of mirror neurons, they wondered? Quite possibly, as it turns out. What, then, would someone with a deficit look like? Well, they’d probably look a lot like autistics, according to psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, of Cambridge University.

Buttercups in January

Unseasonably warm winters in localized regions of North America may be evidence of climate instability as a result of overall global warming. The rate of warming may have adverse effects on global vegetation and agriculture.

Corporate interests killed the video star

Splicing and re-engineering pre-existing movie footage and creating an ersatz music video or an absurdist parody can provide a whole lot of entertainment for viewers and a whole lot of exposure for budding young artists. Some copyright holders, unfortunately, aren't overly concerned with art. What suffers as a result? Only the future of the internet as a venue to express creativity.

Reminders

When I read Denise Grady’s Struggling Back From War's Once-Deadly Wounds in the Sunday Times, I realized that I had forgotten about the war.

Pending what we already know about the Academy Awards

As every Oscar-predictions blog I have consulted in the last week announced, Brokeback Mountain will continue its raid on the award season by winning the Holy Grail on March 3rd. But...

Blatantly shallow and loving it

Just when you thought women's magazines couldn't get any more superficial, they bring us...Skin Deep

The hell-word

Daniela Sea, the new genderqueer character Moira on the L word, is only the second out actress on the show. She lends the melodramatic series in its third season a shred of the street-cred that it was sorely lacking.

Ahmadinejad, Israel, and anti-Semitism

Wiping Israel “off the map” will do nothing for Iran’s future