"In my studio, I always had bathing caps, hot water bottles, galoshes and enema bags – anything that I could fill up." >> more



"Fate is a female system of self-deception." >> more



Why does it matter that a pessimist deliver her message with brio? >> more



"When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived” >> more



Ode to a tampon >> more



"A doctor told him to either quit smoking or quit running into tornadoes, because his lungs could not survive both." >> more



Paralipsis vs. occultatio >> more



Where on the spectrum of loyalty and betrayal does song begin? >> more



"Okay, so you know as a writer that we don't believe in ourselves very consistently." >> more



"His were the eyes of a man who has gazed into the abyss, and the abyss gazed back, and then he endorsed the abyss." >> more



"I have answered fuck, now I will do cunt. Then they will leave me in peace.” >> more



Writing at the frontier, at "the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other." >> more



"I’m suspicious of things that make sense. False security. Whereas contradiction does make sense to me." >> more



"Oh my god, I didn’t see you./You must be in a hurry, you offer./No, no, no, I really didn’t see you." >> more



I went to a crystal healer >> more



She wrote "about that which is more than one, and more than two, but less than infinity. This finitude is important” >> more



"One just shows how phony the other is." >> more



Meteorite identification >> more



How to make bismuth crystals >> more



" If it ain’t on a loop, it ain’t art." >> more



Is making artwork self-indulgent? >> more



"Because living": My New York Times interview with Willow and Jaden Smith >> more



UC Berkeley pulling plug on anarchist Emma Goldman's archive >> more



"it was only/so many minutes a whole life/is that a lot or a little" >> more



"The first few lines keep giving birth to more and more lines. Like most poets, I don’t know where I’m going." >> more



"I would say that happiness can be momentary but that it also happens frequently" >> more



Kairos vs. chronos >> more



Mikhael Bakunin is wanted by the Brazilian police >> more



Harper Lee ate Burger King while watching an advance screening of Capote >> more



"Taffeta" and "bolshevism": Words with biggest gender recognition gap >> more



"Long enough to notice the mango" >> more



No poison in Neruda's exhumed remains >> more



Crash optimization for self-driving robot cars >> more



"Millions of small fish that swam into the marina en masse, used up all the available oxygen, suffocated and died" >> more



Chinese-South Africans reclassified as "black" >> more



Here's a first world problem: "The inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on pleasure as you are." >> more



The single copy of Wu-Tang Clan's new album: "This is like somebody having the scepter of an Egyptian king" >> more



Last king of Rwanda lives in low-income housing in Virginia >> more



What's the payoff, cash value of poetry? "Only accumulated protestations of the human heart. Only that." >> more



"To love the sunset is not, as they say, one of the attributes of exile." >> more



Jackson Pollock's 1943 application to work at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting >> more



"Adolescence is modern life's black hole, a gravitational field so intense nothing can escape it." >> more



Widening gap between productivity and median income >> more



The first filmed kiss >> more



Why must a man with sufficient to live on go off in search of peppercorn? >> more



There is still a bus service from Damascus to Beirut >> more



On pervasive, default low-grade ambient humor: "What is absurd isn’t falsifiable; puns register no truth value." >> more



"It would be quite nice if there was slightly less outrage about the same things all the time." >> more



"I came here in peace, seeking gold and slaves” >> more



Žižek cut-and-paste: "Every joke cited, paraphrased, or narrated in [his] work in English" >> more



"Do what you love" as an ideological tool of capitalism: "Why should our pleasure be for profit?" >> more



I expected this list to be a lot longer: gender identities >> more



"Nobody will find my bones," he promised, and nobody did >> more



In a mass knife fight among every U.S. president, who would win? Probably not Jimmy Carter >> more



S.S. Van Dine's twenty rules for writing detective stories: "There must be no love interest" >> more



Omnivorousness as highbrow taste >> more



Guide to Ottoman hats >> more



Heroin baggie stamps >> more



"Pregnant Sims can no longer brawl" >> more



How to swear in Quebec French >> more



"Something wearying, predictable and banal about knowing things" >> more



Pornography as an aesthetic offense, not a moral one >> more



Surfers say "I drowned" instead of "I almost drowned": "Drowning, after all, feels like almost drowning until it feels like nothing." >> more



Dwight Howard meets Dominique Dawes >> more



100 words for snow, including penstla, the idea of snow >> more



“Getting rid of the fishy smell of fox meat is one of the hardest tasks in the world!” >> more



Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum collection, sorted by color >> more



"The possibilities that open up when we behave as if there are no things that are always true and that philosophy is dead." >> more



Zadie Smith on corpses: "A persistent problem for artists: How can I insist upon the reality of death?" >> more



Challenges on reality show for writers include diary entry from perspective of someone who has gone blind >> more



"Forgeries must be served hot" >> more



"There should be no ecstatic moments of recognition" >> more



Not ten people whose deaths would spoil my dinner, but "one or two whose deaths would break my heart" >> more



Another dead and empty planet >> more



"I’m much more into dead plants and seed pods” >> more



"The sun has not exploded but is dying / five million years left / write that down" >> more



Visiting Star Axis: "That tells me the world is not getting easier to decipher" >> more



An inauspicious beginning >> more



At the book destruction plant >> more



"You owe it to the art to examine the nuances of your discomfort" >> more



Vicarious emotions: "sensitivity to something other than palpable needs" >> more



"Each man had one person to shoot, and so everything should have been alright." >> more



"Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck." >> more



"The enormous condescension of posterity” >> more



Filling a vessel drop by drop: "at last a drop which makes the heart run over” >> more



"You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea." >> more



Ray Bradbury interview rejected by Paris Review for being "a bit informal in places, maybe overly enthusiastic" >> more



No Volvo owner will ever face the challenge of an unwanted compliment >> more



Ununpentium, the newest element >> more



The complete FBI files on Charles Bukowski >> more



YouTube fails to deliver one single actual cow-tipping video >> more



On weekends I like to: talk all night about the people we’ve wronged and how we hate them for it >> more



List of artists who committed suicide >> more



A "poor speaker, with a lisp and a pronounced provincial accent," Karl Marx's first job was as a political reporter >> more



"I forget he’s there until one of the camera operators says, ‘I think Kanye West fell asleep.’" >> more



“Designers, stylists, models: we’re all such professionals,” she observed wryly >> more



Allen Iverson has a deferred trust worth more than $30 million that he can't touch until he turns 55 >> more



Busyness as "a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness" >> more



On the quest for novelty: "not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another" >> more



Didion called Franny and Zooey self-help copy: "what makes it spurious is Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living." >> more



"My other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—other people’s faces." >> more



"If anyone else had asked her if she was “fucking retarded” at a Jeremy Scott party, she’d still be in a shame spiral. But from Lohan, it just felt, she said, amazing." >> more



The best fashion model in the world >> more



"The storm spirit is abroad on the night": Collection of English ballads about disasters >> more



Reviews of BIC For Her ballpoint pens >> more



Cypress Hill played through a squid's fin >> more



Sexual selection not just for genetic fitness but from a preference for the “merely beautiful” >> more



A bacterium on a diatom on an amphipod on a frog on a bump on a log in a hole at the bottom of the sea >> more



Legal battles over art as an extension of the artistic process >> more



Wrong choice "death pages" from Choose Your Own Adventure books >> more



Difference between a geek and a hipster: whether you "delight in sharing a thing" >> more



Robert Rauschenberg's "Canyon" >> more



Lanai sold to CEO of Oracle >> more



"Coolness: An Empirical Investigation" >> more



"Nothing interferes with my own writing except my irresolute character and the limitations of my talent." >> more



"You sort of know the clothes that defined who you were and still define who you are. And then the other things were you pretending to be someone else." >> more



Map of wind patterns >> more



Suburbs of Shanghai, built to look like European locales >> more



Resemblance of flower petals to slices of steak: Japanese word for peony can also mean wild boar meat >> more



The greek foot, piede greco >> more



A billion stars in one image, for the first time >> more



Those of us who are "repositories of revolutionary artifacts, passed down from our parents and grandparents, or, if we’re old enough, from our own past selves." >> more



The artistic principle that guides him is awesomeness, he says. >> more



"Look to the west after sunset Sunday night and, unless clouds impede the view, you’ll see three worlds." >> more



Baudelaire prayed to the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe >> more



For $90, nonviolent prisoners in Santa Ana, CA can get an upgrade to a clean, quiet cell >> more



Zora Neale Hurston's back-up plan was a really good chicken soup >> more



Irony: “that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.” >> more



Petronius, likely author of the Satyricon, was Emperor Nero's official "arbiter of elegance" >> more



"It's gotta be a topless bar!" he cried. "This is the greatest fucking headline of my career!" >> more



Pirate ransoms are tax-deductible >> more



JSTOR, the repository of scholarly papers, turns away 150 million attempts at access every year >> more



Ayn Rand briefly had a column for the Los Angeles Times >> more



Sketchbook of Susan Kare, who designed the symbol on the command key >> more



“Being a tomboy helps a bit. Most of the great style icons are tomboys, or they don’t admire themselves physically.” >> more



Live webcam at the South Pole >> more



Boswellia trees, which produce frankincense, could disappear within 50 years >> more



Jacarandas, “those lavender flowers, like cotton candy clouds,” were Nabokov’s favorite thing about Los Angeles >> more



A whole chicken in a can >> more



Gift guide for me: everything on this Vaclav Havel reading list >> more



R. Kelly has written 32 more chapters of "Trapped in the Closet" >> more



"The redeeming thing about beauty is the emptiness of it . . . it doesn’t carry any other meaning, which makes it sort of like death, except not funny." >> more



"Operation Last Chance II" >> more



The sensation of "words coalescing into sentences I liked" >> more



"You can't sense what they tasted in the air as they were doing it: freedom, fury, the power – for once – of being young and strong and agile and a homegirl, the flat-out joy of getting your hands on some free stuff." >> more



Why burn doctors hate cup ramen >> more



Humor is the brain's reward for discovering mistaken assumptions >> more



They say/ that Napoleon/ was colourblind/ & blood for him/ as green as/ grass >> more



Scientific American launches blog devoted to octopuses >> more



"Judging something interesting is often a first step in actually making it so." >> more



CA Supreme Court to decide if Stephen Glass is fit to practice law >> more



Music as torture: FBI considers Barry Manilow "excessive force" >> more



Ninth severed foot found in British Columbia >> more



Three-quarters of the honey sold in grocery stores isn't technically honey >> more



"He is pretty funny. He will be even funnier when he gets older and sadder." >> more



"There are always a few days during a Los Angeles winter,

when the sky seems to open up, and all the water falls out." >> more



Yo, Is This Racist? >> more



Mao liked hoops >> more



Iris Apfel to design a line for Home Shopping Network >> more



Acne vaccine in development >> more



Major sperm bank stops accepting donations from redheads >> more



All 60 women in the LeTigre song "Hot Topic" >> more



Map of waterflow toponyms >> more



“You can live more privately here than anywhere else and yet still be in a city,” David Hockney said of L.A. “In a way I moved here for the isolation.” >> more



The poet's dream: to be "so important and renowned that she literally is not contractually obligated to deal with poets or poetry whatsoever" >> more



Barbeque cookbook by Black Panther founder Bobby Seale >> more



Backlash against minimalism >> more



Zomia: "the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states" >> more



The Corpus of Contemporary American English >> more



$5,000,000 worth of illegally downloaded files >> more



"For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you." >> more



Helmut Lang turns 6,000-piece clothing archive into "stalactite" sculptures >> more



Before he ran Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai ran "slightly exotic" restaurant in Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago >> more



Are assholes worse than douchebags? >> more



Qatar is the world's top contemporary art collector >> more



Oxford University internal style guide recommends against the Oxford comma >> more



Moving a Richard Serra sculpture >> more



A transgendered person is murdered in a hate crime every month >> more



Fran Lebowitz: "I have a real pimp’s taste in cars." >> more



"People from between somewhere and nowhere" >> more



"Opposite of a parade" >> more



Awesome people hanging out together >> more



DIY cotton candy machine >> more



Personal effects of the Unabomber at auction >> more



Mutatoes: Photographs of ugly/awesome fruits >> more



Custom portraits of your favorite rock >> more



The nine artifical dyes approved for food >> more



Where We Are There Is No Here >> more



"Montaigne, per Montaigne, was lazy, mediocre, and “full of inanity and foppery”; he had a lousy memory and a small penis." >> more



A "quiet act of valor" from Stephon Marbury >> more



". . . the stubborn failure of objects to provide the benefits demanded of them" >> more



Carine Roitfeld: "It's often the case that what a woman reads makes her more attractive than what she wears." >> more



Woody Allen's favorite typeface, Windsor EF Elongated >> more



Ai Weiwei: "I don't think I'm brave . . . but I really want to be myself, to state my mind clearly." >> more



A "series of tragic events that nearly rewrote a nation’s history, based on a lie." >> more



"In Newton's universe, equations can run in either direction – forward or back. But there is one equation that runs only one way: heat turns to cold." >> more



"I think that the habit of reading is intensely pleasurable and it's also hard." >> more



"Octopuses are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind" >> more



Octopuses, octopi, octopodes? >> more



Irma's World >> more



Where do potholes come from? >> more



About time: A brief history of time zones >> more



It's All About the Lighting (2011) >> more



Le Corbusier-designed city in India, Chandigarh >> more



Vacation tour to Iraq >> more



Vagueness in speech >> more



Clouds: "an improbably resilient adversary" >> more



"Its viscera came out with an easy tug; a small palmful of livery" >> more



"Zapped by the god of Absurdity" >> more



Rule-breaking as a measure of humanity >> more



Hipstamatic photo wins photojournalism award >> more



Kim Jong-il looking at things >> more



How to make a macrame plant hanger >> more



"I had this feeling like I had forgotten to be young" >> more



Andrea Zuckerman is 50 years old >> more



"Blood Wars" tournament: White blood cells from two people, battling in a petri dish >> more



Outsourcing to high-security prisons >> more



Suprematism, constructivism, and "a thrilling element of Soviet over-reaching" >> more



J.L. Austin's "A Plea for Excuses" >> more



LACMA's digitized exhibition catalogues >> more



Literary outlaws >> more



The unintentional: "a habit that has slipped, as if it no longer matters enough to remember" >> more



The "bouquet of printer’s ink: ash, black pepper, cordite, with a hint of brimstone" >> more



"Sometimes impulsiveness and self-indulgence were no more than that, but every once in a while they were something you might call genius. I worried about genius." >> more



Leonard Cohen calls for moratorium on covers of "Hallelujah" >> more



Maurice Merleau-Ponty was discovered dead with his face in a book by Descartes >> more



Darkest possible sky >> more



Child geniuses in literature >> more



My interview with Rafaël Rozendaal for XLR8R magazine >> more



"I want to tell you what your thing is." >> more



Condoleeza Rice: "You don't get married in the abstract" >> more



Britain's last maker of glass eyeballs >> more



The pork is in the mail >> more



Amish romance novels >> more



The going price for street pecans >> more



New jalapeno developed specifically to hold more cheese >> more



Tunisia has three presidents in 24 hours >> more



The single issue of Wonder Magazine >> more



Basketball court design >> more



Peer-reviewed journal article claims to show existence of ESP >> more



Allen Iverson tries his first Philly cheesesteak at T.G.I. Friday's in Istanbul >> more



Tupac's 1996 prom date >> more



Rei Kawakubo on selling Comme des Garcons: “I don’t think there's anyone who would want to buy it." >> more



Explanation of different types of cream, from whipping to clotted >> more



Photographs of people jogging with Madonna >> more



Only two families remain at Cabrini-Green >> more



The complete musical works of Marcel Duchamp >> more



"Everything I do is to protect my hands" >> more



The "terrorism of politesse" >> more



The Rejected Project >> more



Tweet this: "Charge, angry youth" >> more



Design objects are taxed at a higher rate than art objects in Europe >> more



A "private little graduation speech" from J.D. Salinger >> more



Who owns Antarctica? >> more



Can you draw the internet? >> more



Truths for Mature Humans: "Bad decisions make good stories" and "I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired" >> more



Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke >> more



"I sometimes think I write books in lieu of letters and that real letters have more kindness in them, addressed as they are to one friend.” >> more



Spreading Santorum >> more



"Sorry I haven't posted": Aggregation of blog posts that include that line >> more



Walk the solar system >> more



I could care less >> more



Bangable dudes in history >> more



Does our economy depend on delusion?: "Modern consumption is open-ended, a longing for something unknown and thus potentially transformative." >> more



Future of dance >> more



Hells Angels file trademark challenge against Alexander McQueen >> more



Jeffrey Deitch house tour >> more



Why you should write poetry >> more



Aiding and abetting your wanderlust >> more



Sixth taste? Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and kokumi, the creaminess in dairy >> more



Be still my heart. A reality TV show about shopping for "Oddities" >> more



Sony has ceased production of the Walkman >> more



Black Panther coloring book >> more



"There should be a word that means “the fatal underestimation of another’s honesty."">> more



Philosophy of jokes: ". . . the more interesting a subject is, the more boring the accompanying philosophy." >> more



Narwhal tusk at auction >> more



Hunter S. Thompson's cover letter: "I'd rather offend you now than after I started working for you" >> more



Satanic images: The 666th picture taken on people's digital cameras >> more



Censored Chinese internet plug-in >> more



Books from David Markson's personal library available at The Strand >> more



Bread subscription >> more



Bats have developed regional accents >> more



"The pigskin ceiling tiles are peeling off. The Mies van der Rohe chairs need reupholstering." >> more



Foraging for thimbleberries and gooseberries >> more



Rodney King engaged to "juror number 5" from his trial against the city of Los Angeles >> more



Combat meals >> more



The "exaggerated passion of adolescence": breaking into pools, drinking beer, driving beat-up old cars at night while reading aloud from a quiz in a women's magazine >> more



Degrees of beef marbling >> more



Crimes punishable by death in China include smuggling gold and passing forged checks >> more



Guerrilla bike lane >> more



Types of bitches >> more



Photographs of slime molds >> more



The phenomenology of ugly >> more



Envy, or, dating Jonathan Franzen: ". . . what did his success prove if not that when the gift is prodigious enough, the world does need us?" >> more



Nine-day traffic jam >> more



Neuroscientist who studies the brains of psychopaths discovers he has the brain of a psycopath and is related to Lizzy Borden >> more



Chemical reason secondhand bookstores smell like "good quality vanilla absolute" >> more



"Freedom to do whatever we want and the freedom to not matter" >> more



Company hides opt-out clause in online legal disclaimer giving them ownership of your immortal soul >> more



Former food critic lives off $200 a month in food stamps >> more



Films that most frequently use the word "fuck" >> more



U.S. government's list of street terms for "pot" >> more



Plans for a gay bar next door to the mosque near Ground Zero >> more



Spelling bee for cheaters >> more



Mongolian neo-Nazi group Tsagaan Khass ("White Swastika") >> more



Salvador Dali had a pet anteater >> more



Triceratops may have never existed >> more



U.S. states in which it is illegal to collect rainwater >> more



"People tell me, 'Your website makes me feel okay with collecting weird things, being messy, having weird shoes'" >> more



Items seized at New York's JFK airport >> more



Leaning Tower of Pisa has stopped leaning >> more



Origin of currency symbols >> more



Emailing while sleeping >> more



"Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question claims to originality: Is a creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor?" >> more



Russian speakers are better able to visually distinguish shades of blue than English speakers >> more



Portion sizes in depictions of the Last Supper have doubled since Medieval period >> more



On the menu at the Last Supper: grilled eel and orange slices >> more



Indigo dying DIY >> more



Laver's law: the lifecycle of fashion >> more



Olivier Theysken's corner deli shopping list >> more



Jeffrey Eugenides: "Bellow was good at writing about himself, but not me. I don’t know who I am." >> more



South pole of Jupiter >> more



Chicken came before the egg >> more



Live in a museum for a month >> more



Appeals court rejects FCC policy on "fleeting expletives" >> more



“I don’t even like to look at albums of my kids when they were little. This is today. Once it’s over, it’s over.” >> more



Iran bans the mullet >> more



Michael Jackson's patent for anti-gravity shoes >> more



It's true what he said: I often like the idea of a thing more than the thing itself >> more



Intellectual property among chefs >> more



Islands for sale >> more

Woodlands for sale >> more



eBay price guide for first issues of magazines >> more



Locked, writers-only private room in the New York Public Library >> more



Craving sassafras twig syrup: "Think root beer with a lot of lemon in it." >> more



"'Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.' So is vomiting." >> more



Map of public art in Los Angeles >> more



What happened to King Tut's penis? >> more



Raids on illegal pinatas >> more



Landlocked countries >> more



Female, non-white Marvel superheroes >> more



There are more Ethiopian doctors practicing in Chicago than in all of Ethiopia >> more



We experience greater pain when we believe it to be intentionally inflicted, rather than by accident >> more



"Sometimes, we simply like pain; it confirms our sense of how the world is. . . . the quality of being profoundly true to life." >> more



Headless rooster lives for 18 months after non-lethal decapitation >> more



Contest: Turn your dissertation into an interpretive dance >> more



"When I can’t sleep, I think about what I’m missing. . . . I wonder what I would be dreaming about, if only I could fall asleep." >> more



Reuters working with Adobe on Photoshop component that would record changes made to photographs >> more



Video of world record-setting free dive >> more



Make something cool everyday >> more



Street vendors without a license in New York City can legally sell books and art >> more



Why Los Angeles is no place for a poet >> more



Displaying sun-faded paintings in a state of "simulated newness" >> more



As evidenced by my "About" section, I'm a big fan of subject postponement >> more



Frank Gehry: LEED certification has become fetishized, like "if you wear an American flag on your lapel." >> more



Supreme Court closes front door: "We are becoming a nation of moles, timorous creatures who scurry through side and subterranean entrances." >> more



Top 40 magazine covers of the last 40 years >> more



Kathleen Hanna bequeaths her papers to NYU, for the university library's Riot Grrrrl Collection >> more



The business of poverty >> more



Monkeys writing Shakespeare: "The appeal . . . has never had anything to do with monkeys, but rather with the notion of greatness through infinity." >> more



Fourteen-year-old Malcolm Gladwell running in a 1,500 meter race >> more



Portraits of rural Africans: one in typical poverty pose and one dressed “wochena” (“dressed to kill”) >> more



"Would you pay $109 for a notebook? >> more



Squid ink buns, taro rolls and sea salt lattes >> more



Reverse engineering McDonald's french fries >> more



The four signs of the apocalypse: "formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism" >> more



Shaquille O'Neal curates art exhibit about size >> more



Should affirmative action consider class instead of race? >> more



U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service auctions items seized from illegal animal trade >> more >> more



"Introverts are people who find other people tiring" >> more



Philosophy classes on YouTube >> more



Caviar vending machine in Moscow >> more



Free mini-album of collected sounds by Jarvis Cocker >> more



Black American babies cost $8,000 less to adopt than Hispanic or white babies; girls cost $2,000 more than boys >> more



Heinz ketchup changing its recipe for first time in 60 years >> more



Stealing tiny fragments from priceless works of art >> more



Should artists have a right to a share of the profits from resale of their work? >> more



"Daria: The Complete Animated Series" released on DVD >> more



Fashion Law Institute, finally >> more



Subway applies to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for exclusive use of the term "footlong" >> more



Last Jew in Afghanistan >> more

Last of the Asian Godfathers >> more



Woolly mammoths had antifreeze blood >> more



NASA logo known in-house as "the meatball" >> more



Hirshhorn Museum director asks staff to help make the lobby/gift shop look busy during donor visit >> more



Only 20 percent of the salt on a potato chip dissolves on the tongue; the rest is ingested with no contribution to taste >> more



On the duty to be happy: "How did we become unhappy about not being happy?" >> more



Blood type discrimination in Japan >> more



Peter Singer advocated eating oysters in Animal Liberation >> more



Lead a tour of something, somewhere: "Going Places, Doing Stuff" call for proposals >> more



How do you pronounce "Moleskine"? >> more



Somewhere in the world there is a sunset right now >> more



Sound of space dust colliding with Earth's ionosphere >> more



The words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary >> more



Why are there so few female critics? >> more



Well-deserved Pulitzer Prize >> more



Shyness as a preoccupation with the self: "At the very least, if you’re shy, you’re never bored" >> more



History of Prussian blue, the first synthetic color >> more



Cake vs. pie bracket >> more

Tournament of books >> more



Writers' day jobs >> more



Ai Weiwei spends eight hours a day on Twitter >> more



The courage of the present >> more



Soldiers in Afghanistan wash their clothes in cement mixers >> more



Off-menu fast food items >> more



Condolence gift bag for Oscar nominees who didn't win includes one-year supply of Altoids and African safari >> more



China's latest fashion icon: the "Handsome Vagabond" >> more



The pleasures of boredom >> more



Kit Kat flavors worldwide, including Salt-Watermelon and Chestnut >> more



"Real criticism is not about distinguishing good from bad; it is about distinguishing good from great. . . . The curse of our time, in the arts, is mediocrity and ordinariness . . ." >> more



Transcriptions of a sleeptalker >> more



Rejected New York Times slogans: "Always decent; never dull" >> more



Taxing the human body >> more



NBA projects losses of $400 million next year, says David Stern >> more



Job opening: Obama's twitterer >> more



Buy seeds and grow your own Nicotiana Tabacum >> more



Intersex people aren't allowed to serve in the U.S. military >> more



Five cent shopping bags and behavioral economics >> more



Is this work of art really "uncollectable"? Or just always on sale? >> more



Rebel artist's tragic ending >> more



After five years of deliberate spending, works by women now account for 17 percent of Centre Pompidou's collection >> more



Top corporate and special-interest donors to federal-level politics >> more



In the history of material culture, the Makapansgat pebble represents "the birth of want" >> more



What typeface are you? >> more



History of the ampersand >> more



"Can we ever find 'perfection' or 'certainty' or 'truth'? No! Then let us stop using such words in our formulations.": An argument for eliminating all forms of the verb "to be" >> more



How to guarantee your luggage won't be lost >> more



There are 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow. Some have even learned how to ride the Metro >> more



New book about the Getty: "Chasing Aphrodite: Decline and Fall of the World's Richest Museum" >> more



Snowballs made by wind >> more



In defense of a "general and massive easing-up on widows and orphans" >> more



How to be insulting without being ill-bred, or, the only thing written by Bertrand Russell that I've ever wanted to read >> more



Roman dialect has word to describe the act of stabbing someone in the butt >> more



Neanderthals wore make-up and were thus "capable of symbolic thinking" >> more



On art projects that are never completed: "It is the “unbuilt” or unfulfilled nature of the future that drives manifestos" >> more



Helvetica in Arabic >> more



State of Illinois sued for serving prison inmates too much soy >> more



Dim sum visual dictionary >> more



"Life Before Death": Walter Schel's photographs of people before and right after they have died >> more



The morality of selling babies >> more



The only writer to graduate from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters >> more



"I will seriously consider eliminating the penny," Obama said >> more



Walking drunk vs. driving drunk vs. biking drunk >> more



Journalism corrections of the year >> more



Is art blogging really that bad, asks Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times >> more



Michael Stipe's capsule line for Maison Martin Margiela >> more



Idi Amin and gallerist Robert Fraser had a sexual liaison >> more



Italian anthropologists to run DNA tests on Caravaggio's exhumed remains >> more



Terranaut II: A fish-powered bicycle >> more



First time there will be live nudity at the MoMA >> more



Duke University Press publishes two-decade-old doctoral dissertation by S. Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother >> more



Switzerland bans minarets >> more



Was just debating this the other day: The fashion trends for which this decade will be remembered >> more



Forty-six percent of people who own a fake designer handbag buy the real thing within two years: "People were becoming increasingly attached to the real brand even though they never possessed it at all." >> more



The Paradox of Choice, revisited >> more



Maybe this is why art matters: People are willing to pay a lot for it >> more



Gallery show opens at 1 p.m. today. At sundown, all the art will be set on fire >> more



What's the world's most-stolen artwork? >> more



PETA considered "domestic special-interest terrorist" organization by U.S. government >> more



"Eternal Sunshine": Drug wipes out single, specific memory in mice while keeping others intact >> more



Filler words such as "um" and "like" in different languages >> more



I can't believe I hadn't seen this before. A three-way tie on Jeopardy! >> more >> more



Corduroy skirts are a sin >> more



Coalition of artists files FOIA to reveal which songs were used to interrogate detainees: "Mohammed al Qahtani, the so-called twentieth hijacker, said that whenever he fell asleep, the guards would crank up Christina Aguilera" >> more



The two main types of lists, according to Umberto Eco: "etcetera" and "everything included" >> more



Most of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions come from sheep burps? >> more



Two butterflies are born on the space shuttle Atlantis >> more



Has sleepwalking ever been captured on tape? Why researchers know so little about people who kill in their sleep >> more



Pope urges artists to make works that are beautiful >> more



Is Design Within Reach in trouble? >> more



Yemen will be first country to run out of water >> more



Galileo's fingers discovered in a jar >> more



S. A. Andrée's ill-fated balloon journey to the North Pole >> more



How to choose a pen name >> more



Do assassinations matter? An analysis of all 298 assassination attempts from 1875 to 2004 and their political repercussions >> more



Creating the signage that will warn future generations about toxic waste dump sites: "There will always be someone who studies ancient languages." >> more >> more



Make your own Sriracha hot sauce >> more



The importance of a museum's permanent collection >> more



"Two Month's Salary" >> more



The two humanistic enterprises that most loudly declare their commitment to truth are barely on speaking terms. Why we need a Philosophy of Journalism >> more



Jeanne-Claude, dead at 74 >> more Daul Kim, dead at 20 >> more



Is there such a thing as a publicly owned image? Or are there only not-yet copyrighted images? >> more



President of Ultimate Fighting Championship becomes first head of major sports league to welcome openly gay athletes >> more



Discontinued McDonald's menu items, including corndogs and the Jason Kidd burger >> more



Morehouse College dress code bans men from wearing "clothing usually worn by women" >> more



TSA bans snowglobes in carry-on luggage >> more



An ongoing, eight-decade science experiment, unseen by anyone: "It took eight years for the first drop to fall." >> more



The 15 Fortune 500 companies run by women >> more



Instead of a communal water font, machines that dispense single servings of holy water >> more



I ate my first mangosteen last month. I'm drinking bilberry tea right now. Next up: paw paw gelato >> more



The quest to create a new, rational language, absent redundancies and irregularities >> more



Top 200 artists of the 20th century to now, according to an online poll >> more



Paleontologists made stew from the neck of an extinct steppe bison that had been frozen for 36,000 years >> more



Mars Rover is stuck in a pit. "The choice on which way to drive will not be made lightly." >> more



Twenty least powerful people in the art world. Rosalind Krauss makes the cut: "We couldn't remember who she is and we were too lazy to Google her." >> more



Claude Levi-Strauss is dead >> more



The weirdest people in the world? Great academic paper topic I can't believe hasn't been covered before >> more



Ron Artest raps about violence against women in Afghanistan, seriously >> more



Meatless Mondays in Baltimore's public schools has drawn ire from something called Pork Magazine >> more



Yale University Press refuses to publish controversial Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons in book about the controversy >> more



Economics experiment demonstrates benefits of backstabbing >> more



Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled $8,397 in F. Scott Fitzgerald's lifetime >> more



"No Woman No Cry": Does this lyric mean "There is no woman that does not cry" or "Don't cry if you don't have a woman"? A philologist weighs in >> more



Is there really no word to describe the person at whom a stare is directed? >> more



Slavoj Zizek lecture on new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, interrupted by bomb threat >> more



Editor of WaPo says he "failed to reconcile language with intentions." >> more



Tom Cruise was Christian Bale's inspiration for Patrick Bateman in 'American Psycho' >> more



ACLU considers destroying tapes of board meetings, claiming verbatim recordings are "working papers" not official record >> more



Most popular submission titles to Virginia Quarterly Review >> more



Genocide in Iraq against homosexual men and boys >> more