February 21, 2008 – 03:58 pm
From Gizmodo’s Stairs Bookcase Actually Makes Me Want to Move to London: “Here’s a great idea for anyone who loves books and doesn’t have enough apartment space or a Kindle: a ’secret staircase’ made of English oak, lined with books left, right and center, leading to a loft bedroom in a Victorian 1898 apartments block.”
February 7, 2008 – 11:07 am
From the NY Times’ Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again: “Without attempting to overdo the drama of the difficulty of writing, to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment, with an accompanying intense wish that one [...]
February 6, 2008 – 12:13 pm
Russell Hoban’s novel, Riddley Walker, demonstrates “what happens with peopl on the way down from what they ben” (17). Telling the story of Riddley Walker, a young man caught in the political struggles of his time, the novel takes place on the island of Inland (England) perhaps two thousand years after a nuclear apocalypse has [...]
October 2, 2007 – 12:01 am
gestalt |gə sh tält; -ˑ sh tôlt| : A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.
Theodore Sturgeon’s novel, More Than Human, tracks the formation of “a gestalt life-form” (105), a “new kind of human [...]
September 10, 2007 – 12:03 pm
From NY Times article, Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries: “Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of [...]
August 22, 2007 – 11:22 am
From Poll: 1 in 4 didn’t read book in past year: “One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.” [...]
In Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett summarizes his process of evolutionary investigation with the “stock Latin phrase, ‘cui bono?,’ which means ‘Who benefits from this?’” (62). The basic idea is that one can best approach an evolutionary mystery by first determining who or what is the beneficiary of the equipment or [...]
From Ban it before it multiplies: “Last week Laura Lopez of West Palm Beach, Fla., appealed to school officials to remove 80 books from local high school library stacks…Among the books Lopez had targeted for extinction are “Medical Ethics: Moral and Legal Conflicts in Health Care,” “Coping When a Parent Is Gay,” and “The Cider [...]
YouTube Passes Debates to a New Generation: “The presidential debates are about to enter the world of YouTube…YouTube and CNN are co-sponsoring a debate among the eight Democratic presidential candidates on July 23 in South Carolina, an event that could define the next phase of what has already been called the YouTube election, a visual [...]
Now Hearing
Introducing ReCaptcha
First of all, hat tip to Julian’s Twitter message for this one.
Now, maybe you’ve noticed that the comments on FI have been a little slow lately (not to mention the posts themselves). At first, I was thinking that no one was commenting because, well, no one was really writing. But then I remembered, a few [...]