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In today’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank wittily and intelligently notes that high-middlebrow pundits have whipped their ground troops up into a backlash against a highbrow (or, really, an anti-high-middlebrow) upsurge “that maybe should have […]
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Monkeys are making news across the world of science. As we discussed last week, researchers discovered that tamarin monkeys prefer music composed for them. Yesterday, Science Daily reported a study in which monkeys were found […]
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“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.”
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“I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay/Watching the tide roll away/Oooh, I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay/Wastin’ time….” Time was one thing that OTIS REDDING (1941–67) didn’t have to waste. Posthumously […]
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Like the ant, the teenage stoner labors ceaselessly and uncomplaining, pursuing an arduous task that casual onlookers would dismiss as pointless, yet which is essential to the little creature’s survival. Like the ant, the stoner […]
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He was a violent husband (to four different wives) who managed his depression by consorting with an astrologer; and a drug-abusing freemason who dealt with his self-induced heart condition by consorting with a psychic healer. […]
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The early death of BUDDY HOLLY (1936-59) transformed him into an icon of the Boomers’ Happy Days-esque vision of American life in the 1950s, all poodle skirts and sock hops at the malt shop, or […]
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The precise definition of “New Weird” (a recent avant-garde literary movement seeking to update a moribund Fantasy/SF genre) remains elusive, but the works of British author CHINA MIÉVILLE (born 1972) simultaneously fit and subvert the […]
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If FREDDIE MERCURY (Farrokh Bulsara, born 1946) had been born a century earlier, audiences would have flocked to see him hit high Cs at La Scala or Opera de Paris instead of belting out the […]
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Most of my favorite campus novels — from Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to, say, Don DeLillo’s White Noise — were penned by a novelist who’d done short time […]
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We’ve been reading news today about music composed for monkeys. Most animals don’t respond to music. But is that because music per se is incomprehensible to them, or because it’s customarily created from the spectrum […]
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Here’s a short film that captured my fancy, discovered via Twitter architecture maven @twiliteprincess: Alex Roman’s “Kahn’s Library,” which features the 1965 Phillips Exeter Academy Library designed by Louis Kahn. As a modernist interior the […]
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