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Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly in Back to the Future, Universal Pictures, 1985 by David Beer In the 1980s one of the defining images of cool, for me and my friends at least, was Michael J. Fox skateboarding away from school whilst listening to his Walkman in the...

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,...

In September 1863, a local paper in Somerset, England, ran an article about a man and a woman from Taunton whose child had been stricken with scarlet fever. Depressingly common, a child suffering from the illness itself was not noteworthy—what made the news were the remedies proposed. Distraught, the...

From N+1: It’s possible to have a clear attitude toward Twitter if you’re not on it. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of Western civilization. Never more than 140 characters at a time? Looks like the human attention...

by Andrew Goldstone What are the eras of publishing history? Are they literary eras? I’d like to expand on our discussion of John Thompson’s sociology of contemporary publishing by posing some literary-historical questions. In his post on Thompson, Lee Konstantinou framed some questions about contemporary book publication and promotion...

My problem is that I don’t care about losing things. Last month, at a restaurant, I left a rough grey scarf that my husband gave me on a rainy evening shortly after we began sleeping with each other, shortly after we fell in love—the scarf that, even after warm...

Detail of Hypathia of Alexandria, from The School of Athens, Raphael, 1509-1510 From Eurozine: The German Pirate Party announces the dawn of the “post-gender” age; the chairman of the Frankfurter Börse complains about “discrimination against men”; the journalist Birgit Kelle argues that quotas for women are a restriction of...

The search for the one best way of running is what drives Chris McDougall’s “Born to Run,” which came out in 2009 and has sold at least half a million copies since. The book tells the story of a group of larger-than-life ultramarathoners, with names like Caballo Blanco and...

Gauguin’s Chair, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888 From Jacobin: If you hang out with industrial designers, one thing you may have noticed is that they’re really into chairs. In fact, tastes are predictable enough that you can often tell a designer’s favorite chair maker from his or her shirt. Black...

The Library of Babel, Eric Desmazieres by Sheila Cavanagh It’s no secret that times are tough for scholars in the humanities. Jobs are scarce, resources are stretched, and institutions of tertiary education are facing untold challenges. Those of us fortunate enough to hold tenured positions at financially stable colleges...

by Justin E. H. Smith I don’t know why all these racists are worried about Caucasians being reduced to a minority in Georgia as a result of demographic shifts. In fact it’s logically certain that Caucasians will always be the majority in Georgia: if one is Georgian, ipso facto...

Facebook headquarters, California by Mike Malley Facebook are due to launch their own search engine in early 2013, according to a source at the Californian company. An official announcement is likely in the next 24 hours as Mark Zuckerberg seeks to ramp up the hype for their IPO on...

Alleycat race in London. Photograph by Rakan From N+1: On his last day of work as a bicycle messenger, my brother organized a race. Messenger races, known as alleycats, usually consist of straightforward if anarchic runs across the city. A raggle-taggle peloton will gather at some anonymous starting point,...

From “The Big Tall Wish”, The Twilight Zone, Season 1, 1960 by Michael A. Moodian They say a dream takes only a second or so, and yet in that second a man can live a lifetime. He can suffer and die, and who’s to say which is the greater...

Jane Gallop by Natalie S. Loveless 1. Anecdotalizing Theory I always try to get us to that place where learning begins to dance. The anecdote is a slippery knowledge maker, its politics suspect. On the one hand, it claims the authority of the first person, of presence. But...