Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2665
August 8, 2010
Curiosity: Value Or Vice?
Early modern curiosity was insatiable, never content with a single
experience or object. Whereas Augustine linked curiosity to sensual lust
and human depravity, Renaissance natural philosophers saw it as being
driven by wonder and the engine of discovery.
We've been over this ground before.
(Hat tip: Morbid Anatomy)
Philosophy - Renaissance - Natural philosophy - Human - History
August 7, 2010
Faces Of The Day
A team performs in the freestyle competition of the waterballet event on
the pink friday party of the Gay Games in the western German city of
Cologne on August 6 , 2010. Some 1,000 athletes compete in 35
disciplines during the week-long event. By Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty.
Gay Games - Cologne - Sport - Gay Lesbian and Bisexual - Competition
The Stress Constant
Scott Adams shares his view of stress:
My theory is that stress is a universal constant. If you have lessof it at any given moment, then other people must be taking on more tobalance things out. For example, let's say you go on vacation. Whileyou're on the beach, your coworkers are trying to handle their ownworkload plus the projects you left behind. You haven't reduced stress;you've simply transferred it to your coworkers. And if you work alone,as I do, you can frontload your stress to get...
What Is Marriage?
The Prop 8 ruling prompts Ayelet Waldman to describe her summer reading:
I reread another book, , by Rafael Yglesias. (father, incidentally, of Matthew). This book, published last year, is a devastating and beautiful novel about a long marriage, one that goes through periods of great passion, and periods when it seems love is gone. The novel is structured around the dying and death of the wife, Margaret, from cancer, and is told from the point of view of the husband. We see...
The View From Your Window
Lake Crescent, Washington, 5.58 pm
Lake Crescent - Washington - United States - Intel Corporation - Travel and Tourism
The Nation's Only Anti-Liberal Playwright?
Terry Teachout ponders David Mamet's conversion to a "libertarian-flavored conservatism." And, yes, Mamet's drift away from right-thinking liberalism does give his plays a kind of grit and realism lacking in, say, the ideological propaganda of a Kushner:
"As a child of the 60's," he wrote in the Village Voice, "I
accepted as an article of faith ... that people are generally good at
heart." It was this credo that he specifically repudiated in that same
essay:I do not think that people...
Dry Spell
Ed Yong profiles a group of animals called bdelloid rotifers. The have evolved asexually for between 40 and 100 million years:
They live in an all-female world in which mothers give birth to daughters who are genetically identical clones. No males have ever been found. Many animals, including aphids, sharks and Komodo dragons, can reproduce asexually from time to time but sex is still their default setting... Bdelloids are the tiniest twigs on a tree of life that is otherwise dominated by...
Why We Have Free Speech
Jonathan Rauch - FIRE's CFN 2010 from The FIRE on Vimeo.
Vimeo - Multimedia - Development Frameworks - Flash - Protocols
Lefties
Natalie Wolchover is a scientist turned science writer who blogs over at Facto Diem. Here's part of her post on handedness:
What causes the brain to sometimes switch up or mix around? There is no clear consensus on the matter, just a lot of interesting hypotheses. First of all, left-handedness is barely genetic. A child of two left-handed parents has only a 26% chance of being left-handed: higher than the 1-in-10 incidence in the general population, but not that much higher. Some scientists...
Andrew Sullivan's Blog
- Andrew Sullivan's profile
- 153 followers
