News, reviews, latest trends, breakthroughs, disputes, and gossip in arts and culture http://aldaily.com/ en-us Copyright 2010 The Chronicle of Higher Education Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:02 EDT rss@chronicle.com rss@chronicle.com http://aldaily.com/ald01.gif http://aldaily.com 128 70 Today's News http://aldaily.com Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 EDT <p>Agnostics see atheism as "a theism" - as much a childlike, faith-based creed as the most orthodox of ordinary religions... <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2258484/pagenum/all/">more</a> </p> <p>For Kai Bird, two tragedies - the Shoah and the Palestinian exodus of 1948, known as the Nakba - are "the bookends of my life"... <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2010/bc0608ss.html">more</a> </p> <p>"You're not getting any part of me," Robin said. "I'm being frozen." "No." Peggy said. "Your head is being frozen. I get the rest of you"... <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html?pagewanted=all ">more</a> </p> http://aldaily.com Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 EDT <p>China's audacious gamble: to mount an ambitious public information campaign abroad while denying crucial information to its own people... <a href="http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2010-JulyAugust/full-Dale-JA-2010.html">more</a> </p> <p>Spies? Fools and traitors. "Pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives"... <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/carre-spy-came-cold-boyd ">more</a> </p> <p>"In the grip of a neurological disorder," writes Tony Judt, "I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them"... <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/words/?pagination=false">more</a> </p> http://aldaily.com Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:00:00 EDT <p>Everyone agrees that food portion sizes in depictions of the Last Supper have grown over the centuries. Not everyone agrees why... <a href="http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=3021&current=True">more</a> </p> <p>"I am myself the matter of my book" wrote Michel de Montaigne. He knew that by being so, he was engaged in producing something wholly original... <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/06/a-man-for-all-seasons/ ">more</a> </p> <p>Every household in North Korea is provided with a white cloth, to be used exclusively for cleaning the portraits Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il... <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/24/robert-fulford-north-korea-an-antique-nightmare/">more</a> </p> http://aldaily.com Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 EDT <p>Modern medicine is good at staving off death, but bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left... <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all ">more</a> </p> <p>Women can be as immoral, malicious, and violent as chaps. Anyone shocked by this hasn't paid attention in history class, let alone the nightly news... <a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_myth_of_the_fairer_sex ">more</a> </p> <p>What we hear in poems, says Tom McCarthy, is not selves, but networks, not signal but noise. Rilke called it Ger&auml;usch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static... <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/tom-mccarthy-futurists-novels-technology">more</a> </p> http://aldaily.com Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 EDT <p>Libertarians need Charles Darwin because a Darwinian science of human evolution supports classical liberalism... <a href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/07/12/larry-arnhart/darwinian-liberalism/">Larry Arnhart</a> ... <a href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/07/14/pz-myers/evolution-is-far-freer-than-classical-liberalism/">P.Z. Myers</a> ... <a href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/07/16/lionel-tiger/much-work-left-to-be-done-in-connecting-politics-and-evolution/">Lionel Tiger</a> ... <a href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/07/19/herb-gintis/reflections-on-arnharts-darwinian-liberalism/">Herbert Gintis</a> ... <a href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/07/21/larry-arnhart/defending-darwinian-liberalism-a-response-to-gintis-myers-and-tiger/">response</a> </p> <p>Arundhati Roy now trades in the wildest forms of anti-Americanism and the crudest critiques of capitalism. She has become an outright reactionary... <a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/76345/the-reactionary?passthru=ZTRmZGVlMDIxYjVlYWZjZjBmZDNlMGRjOTY5ZTg0NGM">more</a> </p> <p>David Greybeard, Goliath, Gremlin, Fifi, Olly, and the murderous cannibals Passion and Pom: Jane Goodall remembers them all. Chimpanzees of Gombe... <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383043749291302.html">more</a> </p> http://aldaily.com New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week. We continually test links for reliability. Despite our best efforts, links may fail (often only temporarily) without warning. We apologize for any inconvenience. Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is from line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay." Arts & Letters Daily is a service of The Chronicle of Higher Education.