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Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate

News, reviews, latest trends, breakthroughs, disputes, and gossip in arts and culture

Arts & Letters Daily (08 Jan 2009)January 7

Hannah Arendt is still a thinker for our time, says Adam Kirsch: a time when failed states have again and again become the settings for mass murder... more

Mark Bittman's approach to food is one of ease, simplicity, and quality: this means he walks a fine and constantly shifting line... more

Arts & Letters Daily (07 Jan 2009)January 6

Who Checks the Spell-Checkers? Microsoft Word's dictionary is old and outdated, says Chris Wilson... more

Those Pre-Rafaelite oddfellows: Ruskin's inability to consummate his marriage runs parallel to Rossetti's inability to resist seducing everyone he met... more

Arts & Letters Daily (06 Jan 2009)January 5

Obama has charisma, regarded as a feature you cannot ever really understand. No, say others, you can analyze charisma, break it down into parts... more

Snark: a nasty, knowing strain of abuse that spreads like pinkeye through the national conversation, schoolyard taunts without the schoolyard... more

Arts & Letters Daily (05 Jan 2009)January 4

While impoverished Rwandans bear the costs of conservation and saving the gorillas, the national tourism industry reaps millions... more

When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, many Britons thought it was the beginning of the end of their empire. Still, it took a while... more

If sociologists ignore the genetic components of human behavior and sociality, will other academics - and the wider world - ignore sociology?... more

Arts & Letters Daily (04 Jan 2009)January 3

Simply vilifying the rich, with strikes and class violence, have lost their lustre for Venezuelans. After Hugo Chávez, maybe real democracy... more

Kafkaesque: the nonchalant intrusion of the bizarre and horrible into everyday life, the subjection of ordinary people to an inscrutable fate... more

Time is the stuff of music: it plays with the rhythm of experience. If the world of physics is a space-time continuum, music is a pitch-time continuum... more