Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2555

The Other Adult Films

Matt Zoller Seitz writes in praise of "adult" films, like "The American" and "The Romantics":

The word is often used to refer to language, violence, sexual imagery or other material that adults don't want small children to see. But other films are "adult" in a different, arguably truer sense. They tell stories about people and situations that children (and the childishly minded) either cannot understand or aren't interested in. And they tell them in ways that demand engagement from the...

Origins Of The BFG

Sam Anderson reviews the new Roald Dahl biography, twenty years after his death, and recaps the series of unlucky mishaps that led Dahl to write such fantastic stories:

Dahl had an idyllic childhood until the age of 3, when his older sister suddenly died and was followed, weeks later, by her heartbroken father. This was the beginning of a toxic tsunami of bad luck that would toss Dahl around for the rest of his life. When he was a boy, his nose was cut off in a car accident. (A doctor sewed...

Mental Health Break

Look At This Fucking Hipster gets its very own anthem. Oh. London, how I miss you sometimes:

Web Design and Development - Hosting - Free - Sports Related - Lisa Graham Keegan

Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Figs

Christina Agapakis shares what may be her "new favorite symbiotic relationship":

Figs are not actually fruits but a mass of inverted flowers and seeds that are pollinated by a species of tiny symbiotic wasps. The male fig flower is the only place where the female wasp can lay her eggs, at the bottom of a narrow opening in the fruit that she shimmies her way through. The baby wasps mature inside the fig into males that have sharp teeth but no wings and females ready to fly. They mate, the...

The View From Your Window

New York, New York, 10 am

United States - New York - Metro Areas - Business and Economy - Middle East

Bicycle Manifesto

If it were a manifesto, Kottke would want to sign Felix Salmon's Unified Theory of New York Biking:

Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And -- of course, duh -- they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it's the law. But in stark contrast to...

Annals Of The Obvious

Surprise! There may be a significant correlation between heavy users of Facebook and higher levels of narcissism:

[Participants:] all took psychology tests to measure their levels of
narcissism, which the study defined as 'a pervasive pattern of
grandiosity, need for admiration, and an exaggerated sense of
self-importance' Those who scored higher on the narcissism test checked their Facebook pages more often each day than those who did not.

Facebook - Narcissism - Psychology - S...

Steal This Download

Abby Hoffman lives on: instead of "Steal This Book" you can now go straight to pirating the digital edition.
















Steal This Book - Free - Business - Personal - Piracy

A Poem For Saturday

Between the dark and the daylight,

    When the night is beginning to lower,

A whisper, and then a silence:
    Yet I know by their...

Living With Terror

James Fallows quotes George Friedman's essay "The Nine Year War" as a brave assessment of where we've been and where we're going on this anniversary of 9/11:

Let me state a more radical thesis: The threat of terrorism cannot become the singular focus of the United States. Let me push it further: The United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States. Three thousand people died in the 9/11...