Blogroll

Reflecting on South Dakota’s stem cell research ban

Regardless of your position on stem cell research, there’s one thing South Dakotans don’t have to worry about as a result of President Obama ending restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research. No money for or research using embryonic stem cells will be here.

Nearly 18 months before President Bush restricted funding for stem […]

Midweek Music Moment: Déjà Vu, CSN&Y

Memory is a funny thing. I struggle to recall events my friends, wife and kids remember vividly. Names continually elude me. But what really puzzles me is the relatively mundane — even inane — things that I clearly recall.

A perfect example is Déjà Vu, the album released on March 11, 1970, by Crosby, Stills, […]

Are we seeing the devolution of the written word?

It’s the latest ubiquitous story topic throughout dead tree and electronic media and THE thing everybody absolutely must use or be left in the dust. “Tweeeting” on Twitter.

I don’t — and won’t — “tweet.” While I know it’s ill-advised to be critical of something you’ve never used, I simply fail to see how my […]

Weekend Edition: 3-7

Bookish Linkage

After a December police raid on the organization that helped with much of the research, a Russian publisher has backed out of publishing The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, one of my favorite books of 2007.

Even though it got rid of its standalone book section, the LA Times continues its annual […]

Great, another genre in which I am deficient

One of the things I claim to get from my recent world lit addiction is that it enables me to learn about and at least intellectually travel to all sorts of countries. At the same time, I’ve never been huge into so-called travel books. Any doubt of that was erased when the UK’s The Guardian […]