July 2012

A photographer at the 2007 Las Vegas Adult Entertainment Expo. From Talking Philosophy: …an excellent case can be made that stealing digital content is morally wrong. As such, the arguments I have made elsewhere would seem to apply to stealing porn as well. However, there is an interesting potential...

Delhi, August 1947 From London Review of Books: ‘Astonishing thought: that any culture or civilisation should have this continuity for five or six thousand years or more; and not in a static or unchanging sense, for India was changing and progressing all the time,’ marvelled the country’s future ruler...

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge. While there have been many celebrations to commemorate the design, construction and beauty of the world’s most famous span, one thing that has received relatively little attention is the fact that the bridge continues to be the top...

Sandro Girgvliani by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze It is already 20 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union. We were the generation who was filled with hope in 1989, who expected great transformation of the world after the demise of the totalitarian state. We expected so much. This generation...

In October 1860, Sarah Lois Wadley was a month shy of her sixteenth birthday. Yet even at that age, she was dreadfully concerned about the crisis of the American Union that was unfolding all around her. Just days before the election of Abraham Lincoln, a few months before the...

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, Salvador Dalí, 1940 by Jay Slosar “Don’t look back something might be gaining on you,” said Satchel Paige, a legendary baseball pitcher in the 1930s and 40s who couldn’t pitch in the major leagues because he was black. After Jackie Robinson...

From Secret Behind the Door, Universal Pictures, 1948 by Joanna Freer Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History, by David Cowart, Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 250pp. “Thomas Pynchon merits recognition as America’s greatest historical novelist”, (24) is the rather grand claim upon which David Cowart...

France's ‘Valériegate’ seems trivial, yet will possibly turn out to be one of the most important and problematic events of François Hollande’s presidency, in terms of the way both his presidency and his image are perceived from now on.

From Chicken Run, Dreamworks, 2000 From Smithsonian Magazine: The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on his way to confront the invading Persian forces,...