You gotta love evolution. Japanese people have special tools that let them get more out of eating sushi than Americans can. They are probably raised with these utensils from an early age and each person wields millions of them. By now, you’ve probably worked out that I’m not talking about chopsticks. The tools in question … Read more

In the late 1970s, the historian Christopher Lasch famously described America as a culture of narcissism. Today we might well be called a nation of dysregulation. The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere. Link

In the winter of 1795 a young, talented and cheeky man named William-Henry Ireland signed the bottom of a tattered piece of paper “Wm Shakespeare.” It was the first of hundreds of notes, poems and plays that Ireland forged and passed off as William Shakespeare originals. The world was so desperate to read more of … Read more

THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE AS TOLD BY WONDER WOMAN is an independent documentary feature that looks at female superheroes, warrior princesses and other icons of women’s empowerment in pop culture. Examining the history of fiction’s longest running superheroine, the film raises questions about the possibilities and contradictions of women as popular action heroes. Can … Read more

The vampire story as we know it was born in the early 19th century, as the wicked love child of rural folklore and urban decadence. But in writing these depraved tales, Byron and Polidori and company were refining the raw ore of peasant superstition. And the peasant brain had simply been doing what the human … Read more