Chris Hedges issues a scathing indictment of intellectual stagnation in America’s elite universities. According to Hedges, these institutions are not training the leaders, innovators, and bright minds of the future. Rather, they are training legions of competent middle managers. They… Continue Reading
I gave an “interim book review” a while back for the first of the three volumes of this extraordinary work of fiction. The author, Neal Stephenson, has managed to create something as extraordinary as J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings,… Continue Reading
First of all, the verb “incent.” I heard it first last week and I became infatuated. It’s obnoxious, callous, bastardized, and artificial. The English language molded into plastic, the thick, stiff kind of plastic used to print credit cards. It’s… Continue Reading
In 1954, a woman in Minnesota claimed that aliens had told her that on December 20 of that year, all of civilization would be wiped out in a catastrophic global flood. The story of how that woman attracted a cult… Continue Reading
The quirky and interesting XKCD presents — well, everything:
Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle consists of, I believe, eight books total. Each book is of about novella length – maybe not quite long enough to be a stand-alone novel but much longer than a short story. They are sold in… Continue Reading
Or so says the headline on CNN. Which is bullshit. Watch the video, and you’ll see that the Chancellor of the DC public school system says that only 12% of students in the 8th grade read at a standardized 8th… Continue Reading
The author of this book is a blogbuddy, so I admit I’m somewhat biased in his favor. But I mitigate my admitted affinity for the author on a personal level with the fact that the style of the book is… Continue Reading
Capuchins are small monkeys endemic to the rain forests of Colombia, Venezuela, and the Central American isthmus. They look like the fellow to the left, an adult male, who is about two feet long, not counting his long tail. Cute.… Continue Reading
Last night was a special sort of treat for the Antelope Valley: a lecture given by none other than Ray Bradbury. The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 were both big influences on me as a young man, the first for… Continue Reading