Gladstone, Bill [I shit you not]. “From King David to Freud to Marx, new book traces a family’s history”. JTA. 2004 October 24. In [“The Lurie Legacy,” Neil] Rosenstein links the Lurie lineage — which includes such modern luminaries as Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber — to Rashi, the 11th-century sage, and many other revered […]

“Who’s Getting Your Vote?” Reason. 2004 November. Steven Pinker Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate (Penguin), How the Mind Works (W.W. Norton), and The Language Instinct (HarperCollins). 2004 vote: Kerry. The reason is reason: Bush uses too little of it. In the war on terror, his administration […]

Scientists at the University of Padova offer a resolution to the parodox of heritable homosexuality: homosexuality, in males at least, is [obviously] not an adaptation that ensures the survival of genes, but the side effect of one.Andrea Camperio-Ciani and colleagues argue genetic factors favouring homosexual male offspring could make women more fertile. “Our data resolve […]

Only gets political at the very end Years before September 11th, I attended a debate that asked the question, “Is Islam a threat to Britain?” I attended in the company of some Muslim friends to provide moral support to yet another friend who would be answering the question in the negative. I am proud to […]

Berkowitz, Elana. “Are You With Him? Why Yes, Want to Date Him?” The New York Times. 2004 October 10. [Shane Forbes, founder of Wingwomen.com, a service that provides '"Wing Women" to accompany single men to bars and help them chat up other women] says the traditional wingman’s effectiveness is in decline. “Women are used to […]

Otto KernerJeet, I request more entries about hippie spirituality, if you’ve got it in you. I can’t really sink my teeth into this one, because almost anyone would agree that the behavior described here is destructive. Ask and ye shall receive! Originally printed here No, this is not a post about social democracy or the […]

“A history of sex”, The Economist, 2004 September 23. By examining the DNA of living people, [Dr Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona in Tucson] and his colleagues have found….a lot of variability in the mitochondrial DNA (a type of DNA which follows the female line), and much less in the Y-chromosome DNA (which […]

Parents exist for the care of their children, rather than children existing for the “self-fulfillment” of their parents, a concept that has difficulty penetrating the narcissistic, self-absorbed “therapeutic” ethos of the boomer generation. – me, hereTim Guest, “Bringing Up Me”, The New York Times, 2004 September 26. When I was 4, my mother became a […]

Joanna Moorhead, “‘For decades we’ve been told Sweden is a great place to be a working parent. But we’ve been duped’”, The Guardian, 2004 September 22. (hat tip: Stambord) ["T]he glass ceiling problem is larger in family-friendly Sweden than it is in the hire-and-fire-at-will US, and it has also grown as family-friendly policies have expanded. […]

For a woman to “have it all” (i.e. an ambitious career, a loving marriage, well-adjusted children), it helps if her husband gives up his own chance to do so. Betsy Morris, “Trophy husbands”, Fortune, 2002 October 14. Behind a great woman at work, there is often a great man at home….The men we’re talking about […]

Mary Wakefield reviews The Naked Woman: a Study of the Female Body by Desmond Morris The Naked Woman doesn’t contain enough ideas to stand alone as a science book, nor are the photographs quite good enough for coffee tables.There are photographs? Posted by jeet at 11:14 AM

Tha Beeb has posted an eight-image photo journal about the Yezidis (i.e. Kurds who resisted conversion to the religion of their Muslim conquerors).BBC NewsYezidis are an ancient, pre-Islamic sect of uncertain origin. LexicOrientResearches [sic] believe that the Yazidi creed has elements from Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Justin Huggler, “Hell’s Angels”, The Independent, 2003 […]

etrusco:Oh you heretic! Ricotta? Bechamel IS an integral part of lasagna….damn americans…;) Re: The following article I’d bet good money that what happened to Greek moussaka happened to Italian lasagna. Hegemony, colonization, blahblahblah… Judith Weinraub, “Back to the Classics”, The Washington Post, 2004 August 11. [In] 1896, when Athens hosted the first modern-day Olympic Games…the […]

lindenen:Man. Our diet is so crappy. I will be the first to admit that, serendipitously lazy yet nutritious dishes* aside, mine is too. There was a debate a few months back that, in a nutshell, pitted absolute standards of living against relative standards of living. The libertarian gourmand Waddling Thunder contributed, “It’s indisputably cheaper to […]

Italian is probably my favorite language, judged purely by aesthetic pleasure from both listening and speaking, and my second favorite cuisine (after Malaysian/Singaporean, which I suppose is sort of cheating because it encompasses southeast Chinese and south Indian along with Malay). Americans’ early impressions of Italian cooking, like their impressions of Chinese cooking, were by […]

A twentysomething Iranian’s response to Fahrenheit 9/11 (hat tip: Johan Norberg)It sure is a great country, where someone like Moore trashes the president and gets away with it — and makes so much money!In addition to being funny, the young man’s response raises a good point. For most of human history, heck, in most countries […]

Razib mentioned that Spencer Wells had a National Geographic documentary about the Phoenicians coming out. Mirabilis.ca gives us a little preview.[National Geographic emerging explorer Spencer Wells and Pierre Zalloua of the American University of Beirut] collected blood samples from men living in the Middle East, North Africa, southern Spain, and Malta, places the Phoenicians are […]

Hate do another linker post but this was paragraph from a review of Richard Dawkins’ new book was just too good to pass up. (hat tip: Butterflies and Wheels)Matt Ridley, “Meet the concestors”, The Guardian, 2004 September 18.“For particular genes, you are more closely related to some chimpanzees than to some humans.” A good example […]

“The war for Islam’s heart”, The Economist, 2004 September 16. Three years ago, it was only Americans who asked Why Do They Hate Us? The same question is now being asked by Indonesians, Spaniards, Turks, Australians, Nepalese, French, Italians, Russians and others whose citizens have fallen victim to jihadist “vengeance”.The back of the line is […]

If you’re even the least bit into this sort of thing, you’ll probably enjoy this. Or, for those less bandwidth-blessed, this. via Latino Review jeet adds a link to the actual trailer because arcane and I have been having a back-and-forth in the comments about the political subtext of the film or, at the very […]