One of my favourite urban images is the light from a flickering television emerging from an apartment building late at night. The artist Todd Hido has created a wonderful series of photographs which capture the mood of these scenes perfectly—go to photographs and then homes at night. Via Vvork.
[...] once you have been in an academic career for twenty years certain chores are given you and your range of freedom becomes restricted. Demands of all kinds are made at the same time as family pressures begin to mount and you feel that at that midway point in your life your personality is being [...]
Women compete in a high-heel sprint in St. Petersburg on 21 July 2007. Approximately 100 women took part in the race wearing high-heeled shoes with a required minimum height of 9 centimetres to compete for a shopping voucher worth 50,000 roubles (approximately 2,000 US dollars). Via Feminist Philosophers.
Presently he heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird that sings [...]
On some accounts, the creative activity of God is mobilized by an entirely inexhaustible and uninhibited love. This love, which is understood as being totally without limit and condition, moves God to desire a plenum of existence in which everything that can conceivably be an object of love is included. God wants to love as [...]
Some writers are so incomparably great that even critics cannot dull them. A recent review by Charles Simic of Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe and The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments provides a perfect example. The more Bishop he quotes, the less you want to read Simic; in the end, the natural reaction is [...]
Listening to Steve Reich’s wonderful Six Pianos it struck me—Ulrich Mühe and Steve Reich look very similar.
The scapegoat by means of which the accumulated ills of a whole year are publicly expelled is sometimes an animal. For example, among the Garos of Assam, “besides the sacrifices for individual cases of illness, there are certain ceremonies which are observed once a year by a whole community or village, and are intended to [...]
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full [...]