Famous author Joyce Carol Oates is known for the number and length of her fiction output. But she’s also a Twitter-user, and yesterday she retweeted this pithy thought: “I could shoot 24 million people on Fifth Avenue & I would’t … Continue reading →
Well, it wasn’t exactly clickbait, because it was on TV rather than online. But Maddow’s promise to reveal Trump’s tax returns was the sort of thing you see on the internet all the time, an ad that promises some amazing … Continue reading →
A group called UDI (a bunch of guys from Siberia, by the way) was recently on Britain’s Got Talent. They do a gimmicky thing, and you can probably figure out how they do it. But the effects are wonderful and … Continue reading →
You may already have seen this experiment in which parts of the Trump/Clinton debates were restaged—complete with gestures and expressions matching the originals—with an actress playing Trump and an actor playing Clinton. The idea behind it was this: Maria Guadalupe, … Continue reading →
It may be time to get to know the work of prodigy Alma Deutscher. She’s twelve in this video: I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly impressed. Here Alma plays excerpts from some of her own compositions: And here’s … Continue reading →
This Oscar error wasn’t noticed by so many people. But to Jan Chapman, it was a bit of a shock: Janet Patterson, an Australian costume designer and four-time Oscar nominee (“The Piano,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Oscar and Lucinda” and … Continue reading →
The other day I was reminded by commenter “AesopFan” of this article from last spring: “[Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Ben] Rhodes, 38, said in the article that it was easy to shape a favorable impression of the proposed (Iran) … Continue reading →
If you do, you can enter the competition, which begins soon: The Dept. of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) intends on issuing a solicitation in electronic format on or about March 6, 2017 for the design and build … Continue reading →
We call it “fashion.” But at this point it seems to have morphed into a competition to see who can come up with an outfit that is either strangest and most extreme, or most revealing. Preferably both at the same … Continue reading →
In my life, I’ve had some problems with February. Perhaps you have, too. It’s a short month, but it can be cold and gloomy. Its only holiday is Valentine’s Day, which can be a mixed bag. As a freshman in … Continue reading →
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers generated more human happiness than many do-gooders. In the comments to the YouTube videos of their dance routines, you can find many people (some of them, I assume, young people) lamenting the death of this … Continue reading →
Wordsworth wrote: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…” Now researchers indicate that sleep itself is a forgetting: In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during … Continue reading →