Why We Get Lost in Books - Yahoo! News
Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of "Harry Potter" or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham ( Read more... )

For those with NetFlix: Carl Sagan's Cosmos is now available for instant viewing.

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One of the blogs I read regularly is Respectful Insolence, written by a (thus-far-pseudonymous) oncologist. He is proud of the work he does, and he has no tolerance for those who attack his work out of stupidity, spite or miseducation. People who just don't know are bad enough; people who actively go out of their way to remain stupid are a whole ' ( Read more... )

I never thought much of Malcolm Gladwell, maybe because he reminded me entirely too much of Desmond Morris for his own good. Morris wrote The Naked Ape, in which he tried to use argument-by-analogy to draw rather shaky and tenuous connections between men in civilization and animals in general. Much of Morris's work was based on conceits about ( Read more... )

Ebert goes to town on Ben Stein for the risible Expelled.

I used to like Ben Stein. After Expelled -- for my money the worst "documentary" since those wretched "Prophecies of Nostradamus" scare reels in the 1970s -- my respect for him reached subzero. Read the article and find out why, and check out this other exposé on the flick as well, which has ( Read more... )

In the next week or so I'm going to begin the next phase of the consolidation of all the disparate sites I've been managing.  The individual book blogs are all going to get slurped up and redirected, along with the comments attached to them, and the domain names I had pointing to them will be redirected properly.  I'll also be putting back the ad ( Read more... )

From the NY Times Paper Cuts blog, a piece about bookshelf etiquette:

I like to think of my bookshelves as an enormous store of potential energy - mental energy, that is: I have a non-working fireplace - and an insurance policy against the day when electronic readers have taken over, all the world’s bookstores have gone out of business, and I have ( Read more... )