Here's Sarah Vowell in a conversation with The Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn about the history of the annexation of Hawaii. She's explaining how King Kamehameha's son happened to be dismantling Hawaii's old religion, at the same time the first American missionaries were on their way to the islands ( Read more... )

On the chance someone on my flist is interested or knows someone who might be...

From the Big Finish website:
OPPORTUNITY FOR NEW WRITERS ( Read more... )

At the age of 73, I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. The special value of these indirect methods of communication - as opposed to the value of factual reporting ( Read more... )

* Scientist have sequenced the whole genome of the woolly mammoth! And they did it using nuclear DNA from hairs, not just mitochondrial DNA from bones, which is what they're normally able to do. They think woolly mammoths share 99.4% of their DNA with modern elephants (the Asian variety is a closer match than the African variety) and split off ( Read more... )

I'm "liveblogging" my way through research papers to keep myself sane, but out of consideration for you all, I'll just post it all together at the end. I had all these nice little breaks planned to pause and reply to LJ comments, write drabbles and things, but I always forget how much longer it takes to edit a plagiarized paper. I did manage to fit ( Read more... )