December 2011

by Susan Fox Rogers When I moved to the Hudson Valley from the desert southwest, where I had made my home for five years, I knew I would miss those wide western skies—a cliché, I know, but a good one—under which I could hike for hours and not see...

Margaret Sanger From Barnes and Noble Review: Now is a fitting time to reconsider the life of Margaret Sanger. The United Nations marked October 31st as the day the global population reached 7 billion, a milestone greeted with both celebration and consternation around the world. Sanger would have no...

Northern Distribution Network From Foreign Policy: When people read a news website, they don’t usually imagine that it is being run by a major producer of fighter jets and smart bombs. But when the Pentagon has its own vision of America’s foreign policy, and the funds to promote it,...

Recently, I have hosted a roundtable discussion on the science and philosophy of free will. The idea was to have a serious discussion about the various concepts of free will, as well as what exactly neuroscience can tell us about them.

3D pipes From The Believer: At a Pittsburgh gallery in 2006, artist Keny Marshall exhibited 3D Pipes, an elaborate, freestanding installation of aged metal plumbing. “Everybody’s got 3D Pipes on their computer,” said Marshall in an interview. “The only difference is this 3D Pipes took months to build and...

Cistercian nuns in chapel, detail from frontispiece, Pierre de Blois, La Sainte Abbaye, Central France (possibly Maubuisson) or North Eastern France (Lorraine), ca. 1290. The British Library Board, BL Yates Thompson MS 11, fol. 1v. Reproduced with kind permission by Anne E. Lester To call it a parchment page does not...

From Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 2002 edition. Illustrated by Milo Winter From The Times Literary Supplement: The circumstances in which Robert Louis Stevenson came to write Treasure Island are legendary. The legend originates with the author himself in the essay “My First Book” (1894), written in the...

Can the upper class speak? There are signs that it cannot. Maybe this sounds silly, but if you are still in the market for a future for literary criticism, the accurate description of what the upper-class sounds and looks like might be a good place to start.