Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- What cannabis actually does to your brain (“That’s right – smoking a joint creates the effect of temporary brain damage.”)
- The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science (“…we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one’s sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.”) (via)
Interesting Bookish Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Does anyone want to be “well-read?” (“That’s how I’ve done my reading: Haphazardly, by inclination. I consider myself well read, but there has been no plan.”) (via)
- The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re Going to Miss Almost Everything (“…well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there”) (via)
- The Nobel individual and the paradoxes of ‘international literature’ (“The question arises then: what kind of literature is it that reaches an international public, surviving what is now an industrialized translation process squeezed into the briefest possible time and paying little attention to questions of affinity between translator and text…?”) (via)
Blog Headline of the Week
Blog Line of the Week
Local Linkage
- Free Gas Fail
- Jennifer asks questions and Joel provides information about the library budget, particularly the status of the branch library planned for my side of town. (I will have news somewhat related to this topic in the near future.)
Bookish Linkage
- Creative Non-Fiction is Lying. Lying Kind of Bites.
- Developing nations are the setting for much of modern science fiction, which is “the antithesis of classic American science fiction.”
- The Los Angeles Review of Books has launched a preview site.
- 10 ways digital books are changing our literary lives (via)
- The 2011 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. While I don’t put a lot of stock in them when it comes to books, they are worth noting — although I’ve read none of the winners or finalists.
Nonbookish Linkage
- A U.K. researcher has designed a “Euthanasia Coaster,” a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster “engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being.” I wonder how long the lines would be? (via)
- The “happiest” U.S. states also tend to have the highest suicide rates.
- US Healthcare vs. the Rest of the World
- I think I still cling to my European roots. (via)
- Having lost his voice “due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death,” Christopher Hitchens sends a written message to American Atheists at their convention in Des Moines. (via)
- “The truth is that Led Zeppelin was just as much folk as it was rock as it was psychedelic.”
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen, Side Effects
