How Amazon Hurts Readers
Amazon may on its surface appear diverse, comprehensive and democratic in its wide array of offerings. Yet its danger lies in its monopolization of the power over what so many read.
The Synthetic Texture of Modern Culture (Or, Who Are We Supposed To Be, Anyway?)
Channel 4 has seen the production of myriad reality television programmes under its aegis, ranging from the British incarnation of Big Brother, which requires no elaboration, to Come Dine with Me, in which contestants hold dinner parties for strangers who judge and score their efforts and compete with each other for a cash prize. This...
The Eastern Beat, A Fragmented Introduction
Poverty, scoundrel living, irresponsibility, mad dashing across the country, drunkenness, dancing, sex and orgies – these are what the Beats are most famous for.
Everything* You Didn’t Know about Homer
*Well, almost everything. Well, no, not really. Okay, let me start again. Some Things You Didn’t Know about Homer Homer is often considered the beginning of Western literature as we know it, the big bang of story-telling, with his epic, heroic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey radiating out through the subsequent literary works like...
Twenty-First Century Twenty-Something
In this quickly moving, thoroughly modern American society, so much is being offered- opportunities, information, and even relationships. When I consider just how much is available, I feel something spiked and electric coiling in my chest. It's not affection (close but not yet) and sometimes, it feels like anxiety. ...
Knowledge and Wisdom, Wheels and Brakes
The greatest love of a creative mind is a difficult dilemma. When met with a seemingly unsolvable problem, an active mind kicks it up a gear, rolling along at blazing speeds. No task is too daunting for creative thinkers.
History and Fiction: where one ends and the other begins
A writer of anything, whether you call it fact or fiction, focuses upon one or several things, to the exclusion of all else. For this reason history is always, to a certain extent, alterable...
Trash Versus Treasure
A powerful new solution is beginning to tackle many of these problems in rural Guatemala. Bottle schools. That is, schools constructed using bottle bricks, which are plastic drinking bottles rinsed out and stuffed to the brim with inorganic trash.
Why I have no sympathy for George Rekers.
Accuse me of schadenfreude if you will, but I truly relish the exposure of hypocrisy among the bigoted. Rekers, author of such enlightening titles as Shaping your Child’s Sexual Identity and Growing Up Straight: What Families should Know about Homosexuality, is now embroiled in a very public, gay sex scandal.
The occasional necessity of attention seeking.
In an age where criticism of the Catholic Church is commonplace, it can be difficult to make a serious point really sink in. I have no doubt this difficulty is well understood by prominent Atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Heralds of the so-called “New Atheists” movement, they have attracted attention by calling...
“I’m Sorry…”
[...] So refined is the MFA student’s sense of doubt that, like true professionals, very little escapes it. [...]
Money, Controversy, and Politics: The Passage of Healthcare Reform