“There is a pampered class of artists in the United States,” concedes Gioia, who got to know a wide range of creative types during his years as NEA chair. “But it’s tiny. And they make insignificant money compared to sports people. We have this Puritan, practical tradition in the United States. Puritans would give to the poor, but not to the idle. Artists are seen as these idle dreamers.”

More typical than a celebrity artist feasting on enormous grants, he says, is someone like Morton Lauridsen, who is now one of the most performed living composers – after decades of scraping by, teaching and writing choral works. Or a writer like Kay Ryan, who, until becoming U.S. poet laureate in 2008 was known to only a small few. “She never applied for a grant, never taught writing,” Gioia says. “She taught remedial reading at a community college.”

It was the Coast Guard Academy band, in New London, Conn., that allowed Kelli O’Connor, a conservatory-trained clarinet and saxophone player, to make a living. These days she’s a principal in a nearby orchestra, plays with a chamber group at a Boston church, coaches at area high schools and teaches at the University of Rhode Island: None of these pay a full salary or significant benefits. “Freelancing is a hustle all the time,” she says. “You master the art of scheduling. Squeezing in as much as possible. There are some days when I’m not done until 11 or 12 at night, and then I have to get up at 7 in the morning.”

Like most musicians, she teaches private lessons, but her students have fallen by more than half. “Because of the economy, it’s really gone downhill. People are afraid to spend their money. You’re constantly sending your C.V. to local schools to stir up interest.”

There's no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I'm the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy. The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there's a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.

Yarchagumba looks like a shriveled brown chile pepper and is coveted as an aphrodisiac and medicinal cure-all. Literally translated as “summer grass, winter worm,” it forms when a parasitic fungus invades the burrowing larva of a ghost moth, transforms the ­vital ­organs into a cobweb-like mess, and then sends up a wispy sprout through the dead ­insect’s head. The grisly process plays out across the Himalayas and the ­Tibetan Plateau but only at the beginning of the monsoon and only on reclining slopes of grasses, shrubs, and milk vetch at the dizzying altitude of 10,000 to 16,500 feet. Thanks to a spike in global demand, mostly by Asian men looking to enhance their virility, a pound of yarcha­gumba now sells for as much as $50,000, more than the price of gold. ­Profits from the fungus have transformed entire ­villages, vexed government regulators, and even helped bankroll a communist insurgency. Nepal’s former Maoist rebels admit that taxing (read: ­extorting) yarchagumba pickers was their main source of income in their decade-long war against the country’s monarchy.

It's Lonely in the Modern World

Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way
Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.
...
Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.

Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic. But in the process the church in America became American - or, as Noll puts it, "because the churches had done so much to make America, they could not escape living with what they had made."

As a result Americans continue to maintain a stubborn belief in a god, but the god they believe in turns out to be the American god. To know or worship that god does not require that a church exist because that god is known through the providential establishment of a free people.

This is a presumption shared by the religious right as well as the religious left in America. Both assume that America is the church.

Yes, there's such a thing as a cult.

he Staffordshire Hoard is an unparalleled treasure find dating from Anglo-Saxon times. Both the quality and quantity of this unique treasure are remarkable. The story of how it came to be left in the Staffordshire soil is likely to be more remarkable still.

The Hoard was first discovered in July 2009. The find is likely to spark decades of debate among archaeologists, historians and enthusiasts.

The source of America's cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn't) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn't) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution "dependent on the People," the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers--as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered--not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests...

It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I've never regretted stopping when I did.

The university is a liberals' club no doubt, and most conservatives are viewed with some level of suspicion. But I don't think that reality is grounds to dismiss the very real conservative tendency -- particularly widespread among Christian and partisan conservatives -- to aggrandize their persecution in Hollywood, the media, and academia. Defensive conservative stereotypes about liberal academics almost indisputably feed the tension and whip up an unpleasant bristliness among conservatives in a variety of cultural fields where they are the minority. If your demeanor about your own views begs for hostility, why would you act surprised when it elicits some?

Steve would never let you call him a Troll. He sees himself as a person who likes to argue. In a way, that is not surprising: a Troll worth of the name cannot endorse the label in front of his victims, while he is 'trolling' them. Most regular forum or newsgroup users know about Trolls, and if they spot one, they will shun it, moderate it or refrain from 'feeding' it. Anti-Troll policies are on the rise, which has made the hobby more difficult of late, but also more exciting. Yet Steve's friends, off-trolling, will readily admit to being Trolls. And all of them will recognize a fellow Troll in Steve; some will even say he's the greatest they know. But Steve is so professional that he will never allow himself to let down his facade of sincere interest for argumentation. He won't come out as a Troll.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

So despite its genuinely impressive technical innovations, Avatar isn't much a movie: Instead, Cameron's cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It's not that the film's politics make it bad, it's that even if you agree, the nearly three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing leaves no room for interesting twists or ambiguity in the story or characters: corporations are bad, scientists are good, natives are pure, harmony with nature is the ultimate ideal — the only suspense comes from wondering what movie Cameron will rip off next. The go-to comparison so far is Dances With Wolves meets Ferngully, and that's just about right. But Cameron rips himself off considerably as well: There are gruff marines are straight out of Aliens, stubborn science-types pulled from The Abyss, and a love-across-the-boundaries romance that echoes Titanic — only this time, it's across species rather than ship decks.

To sum up, these “no religionists” are an expanding demographic, particularly among the young. They will likely have a powerful influence on politics and society in the near future, given their estimated growth to as much as 25 percent of the American population within another two decades. Ultimately, other than modest regional, age, and gender imbalances, and a skewed racial distribution, this group is basically no different from America’s aggregate population in terms of socioeconomic standing, education, and a wide range of behaviors and opinions.

Toulmin: Thirty-five years. At that time, if you had said to Rachel Carson in her last years that by the mid 1990s no government in the world with any pretension to respectability would fail to have some kind of environmental protection agency, it would have appeared quite incredible to her.

This is a major change in the agenda of politics, and it's a change which moves precisely in the direction that represents a return from, shall we say, Descartes to Erasmus. I remain charmed by Erasmus's famous essay, In Praise of Folly, which is a prophylactic against the quest for certainty.

Bravo Greater Des Moines (Bravo) is a nonprofit organization committed to strengthening the metro area's arts and cultural community as a key element of a world-class quality of life.

Bravo provides a collaborative focus to nurture and grow the arts by increasing funding through public and private sources.

he Other Journal is a online quarterly journal that aims to create space for Christian interdisciplinary reflection, exploration, and expression. Attempting to remain a notch or two more popular than the typical scholarly journal and a notch or two more scholarly than the typical popular magazine, our goal is to provide our readers with provocative, challenging and insightful Christian commentary on current social issues, political events, cultural trends, and pop phenomena.

Each issue of The Other Journal is organized around a particular theme, and includes sections dedicated to:

* Examination :: articles, essays, and interviews
* Imagination :: creative nonfiction, personal essays, short stories, and poetry
* Creation :: art exhibits
* Perspective :: personal essays that center on an experience of literature, film, or music
* Praxis :: practical applications of theological themes

n the mathematical counterculture, math "was almost a hobby," recalls Sergei Gelfand. "So you could spend your time doing things that would not be useful to anyone for the nearest decade." Mathematicians called it "math for math's sake." There was no material reward in this—no tenure, no money, no apartments, no foreign travel; all they stood to gain was the respect of their peers.

Math not only held out the promise of intellectual work without state interference (if also without its support) but also something found nowhere else in late-Soviet society: a knowable singular truth. "If I had been free to choose any profession, I would have become a literary critic," says Georgii Shabat, a well-known Moscow mathematician. "But I wanted to work, not spend my life fighting the censors." The search for that truth could take long years—but in the late Soviet Union, time seemed to stand still.

One of the great questions facing Christians in the social sciences and helping professions is this one: How do we legitimately and meaningfully connect the conceptual stock of the Bible and Christian tradition with the tech¬nical terminologies and observational riches of the behavioral sciences? Within this perennial question, two particular sub-questions have long intrigued and perplexed me.

One sort of question is a Bible relevancy question. Why is idolatry so important in the Bible? Idolatry is by far the most frequently discussed problem in the Scriptures.1 So what? Is the problem of idolatry even relevant today, except on certain mission fields where worshipers still bow to images?

The second kind of question is a counseling question, a psychology question. How do we make sense of the myriad significant factors that shape and determine human behavior? In particular, can we ever make satisfying sense of how people are simultaneously inner-directed and socially-shaped?

Patrol is a post-evangelical journal of culture and politics.

But it is in the nature of world-builders to be philosophers as well. That is, the best of what Tolkien called “secondary worlds” are extended commentaries on and critiques of this world: they are mirrors cunningly placed so we can see the back of our universe—aspects of our being that are normally hidden from us. Every major secondary world is to some degree polemical, ideological.

So it turns out that, “for almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty well perpetually,” the perfect simulation of reality does not erase the boundary between the real and the virtual but rather intensifies it, and makes the real ever more desirable. And such desire in turn re-creates scarcity in this allegedly post-scarcity society: the stadium where Ziller’s composition will be premiered contains only so many seats, which means that it’s quite possible to want and not get one. (The Mind rather mournfully explains to people that there will be no room to dance.) A very un-Culture experience.

My name is Wesley Hill.

This is my commonplace book and sometime-journal.

The Burnside Writers Collective is an online magazine for followers of Jesus who are looking for a connections with the world outside of franchise Christianity.

Keen criticism on the interwebs and everything related

What makes the female so much deadlier than the male? With assists from Fran Lebowitz, Nora Ephron, and a recent Stanford-medical-school study, the author investigates the reasons for the humor gap.

Hi. This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff Christians like. They are pretty predictable. I sort of consider myself an expert on Christian culture as I am a preacher's kid and I'm also married to a preacher's kid. Christian culture is funny because it doesn't have much (if anything) to do with Christ himself.

At this point, the impatient reader will interject that something else — something understandable and anodyne — is driving the increasing attention to food in our day: namely, the fact that we have learned much more than humans used to know about the importance of a proper diet to health and longevity. And this is surely a point borne out by the facts, too. One attraction of macrobiotics, for example, is its promise to reduce the risks of cancer. The fall in cholesterol that attends a true vegan or vegetarian diet is another example. Manifestly, one reason that people today are so much more discriminating about food is that decades of recent research have taught us that diet has more potent effects than Betty and her friends understood, and can be bad for you or good for you in ways not enumerated before.

All that is true, but then the question is this: Why aren’t more people doing the same with sex?

During the nineteen-eighties, the American gut, instead of expanding very gradually, had ballooned: 33.3 per cent of adults now qualified as overweight. Flegal began asking around at professional meetings. Had other researchers noticed a change in Americans’ waistlines? They had not. This left her feeling even more perplexed. She knew that errors could have sneaked into the data in a variety of ways, so she and her colleagues checked and rechecked the figures. There was no problem that they could identify. Finally, in 1994, they published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In just ten years, they showed, Americans had collectively gained more than a billion pounds. “If this was about tuberculosis, it would be called an epidemic,” another researcher wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

...

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

Wunderkammer Magazine exists to provide a thoughtful examination of culture and society. It is founded on the belief that in order to fully understand what it means to be human, we must understand the era in which we live.

Wunderkammer takes its name from the eclectic, encyclopedic collections of the old nobles which served as microcosms of a baffling world, demanding examination and inspiring curiosity from its viewers. Just as those collections varied in scope, the magazine engages art and culture, technology and education, politics and society, religion and travel. Through thoughtful essays, reviews, and interviews on these topics, Wunderkammer hopes to be a witness of the age. Its goal, as the great English poet W.H. Auden wrote in his poem, “The Horatians,” is to “look at this world with a happy eye, but from a sober perspective.”

I didn't meet Roose until two years after his semester here, when he sat in my office for a friendly, hour-long chat on one of those "good days" of February in Lynchburg, just a few weeks before his book's release. He still comes back to visit the friends he made here—and, on this trip, to talk about the book. Of all the unexpected events at Liberty, the one that most moves him, one included in the book but conveyed even more poignantly face-to-face, is the love his Liberty friends showed him when he finally revealed the truth about who he is and why he enrolled here. One of his roommates, he says, expressed their reaction best: "How could I not forgive you when I've been forgiven so much?" Roose shakes his head in disbelief, sitting in the chair next to mine. "I never expected the people here to apply the principles of their belief to their lives in such a real way."

Of course, change didn't happen overnight. But the marginal cases did have children out of wedlock, which made it more acceptable for the next marginal case to do so. Meanwhile, women who wanted to get married essentially found themselves in competition for young men with women who were willing to have sex, and bear children, without forcing the men to take any responsibility. This is a pretty attractive proposition for most young men. So despite the fact that the sixties brought us the biggest advance in birth control ever, illegitimacy exploded. In the early 1960s, a black illegitimacy rate of roughly 25 percent caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write a tract warning of a crisis in "the negro family" (a tract for which he was eviscerated by many of those selfsame activists.)

By 1990, that rate was over 70 percent. This, despite the fact that the inner city, where the illegitimacy problem was biggest, only accounts for a fraction of the black population.

It is arguably as much or more by making and keeping promises than by dabbling and deferring that we come to know who we as persons really are and are called to become. Emerging adult culture today thus seems to assume more than a little that deserves some hard criticism.
...
For most American youth, there extends between high school graduation day and the eventual settling down with spouse, career, kids, and house a very long stretch of time in which to have to figure out life. For many, it is marked by immense autonomy, freedom of choice, lack of obligations, and focus on the self. It is also normally marked by high instability, experimentation, and uncertainty. For many, emotions run high and low, as hopes and exhilaration recurrently run up against confusion and frustration.

Because Stillman praises convention and doesn’t shun virtue, there are more options open to him. It turns out looking at convention and virtue only through a perspective that disparages them can seriously limit your stock of references. Stillman’s characters can move from examining Jane Austen or War and Peace to analyzing The Graduate from the perspective of the make-out king. Stillman doesn’t feel the need for hip references; he simply explores his interests, and they are fascinating.

If praising virtue leads to creativity, this is good news for contemporary artists because it opens up more options for them. Stillman is proof that virtue doesn’t have to lead to canned narratives. Virtue in a world where it is largely misunderstood is fuel for drama, irony and a whole lot of cinematic fun.

There are 178 people in the picture, all shot in the course of 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin in the summer 2007. Only few of the people on the photograph seemed to know I was taking their picture.

The Curator launched on August 29, 2008 as a web publication of International Arts Movement (IAM), which announces the signs of a “world that ought to be” as we find it in our midst, and seeks to inspire people to engage deeply with culture that enriches life and broadens experience.

In keeping with IAM’s belief that artistic excellence, as a model of “what ought to be”, paves the way for lasting, enduring humanity, The Curator seeks to encourage, promote, and uncover those artifacts of culture – those things which humans create - that inspire and embody truth, goodness, and beauty.

Books & Culture's thoughtful editorial reaches readers who want to be challenged to think beyond today's headlines, to dig more deeply into issues and ideas, and to analyze culture from an informed Christian perspective.

(Somehow I didn't have this bookmarked until now though I've read it for years.)

Here’s how Texas solved the problem of highway litter. They did some research and found that the biggest culprits were 18- to 35-year-old males who drove pick-up trucks and liked sports and country music. The threat of penalty fines didn’t work; nor did appeals to the young men’s sensitive natures about the harm done to local wildlife. So the Department of Transportation ran an advertising campaign that recruited Texas’s sporting and country-music heroes, from Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris to Willie Nelson and Lyle Lovett. One advert had Mike Scott, the Houston Astros pitcher, pick up some litter and—using his famed split-fingered technique—hurl it at a roadside trash can. Cue massive explosion, followed by the catchphrase, “Don’t mess with Texas”.

SALMAGUNDI is a quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences which is addressed to the “general” reader rather than to the academic specialist. Founded in 1965 and published since 1969 at Skidmore College, the magazine routinely publishes essays, reviews, interviews, fiction, poetry, regular columns, polemics, debates and symposia. It is widely regarded as one of the most influential intellectual quarterlies in the United States, and though it is often discussed as a “little magazine,” it is by no means predominantly belletristic or narrow in its purview or its audience.

"The Christian should participate in social and political efforts in order to have an influence in the work, not with the hope of making a paradise (of the earth), but simply to make it more tolerable -- not to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order of preservation that God wants it to have -- not to bring in the Kingdom of God, but so that the Gospel might be proclaimed in order that all men might truly hear the good news."

Some of us have read him as a great commentator on the Bible, others, as a philosopher of technology. But few have seen him as the man who simultaneously challenges the reflection of both the philosopher and the believer. He reminds the philosopher of technology, who studies patent, observable phenomena, to be aware of the possibility that his subject may be too terrible to be grasped by reason alone. And he leads the believer to deepen his Biblical faith and eschatological hope in the face of two uncomfortable and disturbing truths...[that of] modern technique and its malevolent consequences [and that of the] subversion of the Gospel -- its transformation into an ideology called Christianity. — Ivan Illich

On a Japanese cell phone, you type the syllables of hiragana and katakana, and the phone suggests kanji from a list of words you use most frequently. Unlike working in longhand, which requires that an author know the complex strokes for several thousand kanji, and execute them well, writing on a cell phone lowers the barrier for a would-be novelist. The novels are correspondingly easy to read—most would pose no challenge to a ten-year-old—with short lines, simple words, and a repetitive vocabulary. Much of the writing is hiragana, and there is ample blank space to give the eyes a rest. “You’re not trying to pack the screen,” a cell-phone novelist named Rin told me. (Her name, as it happens, actually was borrowed from a dog: her best friend’s Chihuahua.) “You’re changing the line in the middle of sentences, so where you cut the sentence is an essential part. If you’ve got a very quiet scene, you use a lot more of those returns and spaces. ...”

To the extent that what we're called to do in culture is distinctively Christian, it should have the mark of abundance that Jesus' own life had. It's not a matter of finding the thing that is hardest for us and least beneficial and deciding that must be the loving thing to do. Where is it that when you work in this arena, when you cultivate in this field, fruit comes up that you never expected? To me that's the sign that God's at work in the world. And it's not just linear. It's not that I put in a unit of input and get a unit of output. Our culture making should have this quality of grace.

...it also needs to participate in the distinct way that Christ was present in the world, which is suffering in the broken places. So it's not quite enough to say, "Do what you love." No, do what takes you to that intersection where you experience abundance and yet also find yourself wrestling ever more deeply with the brokenness of the world....

Unfortunately, many Christians have allowed themselves to become so estranged from contemporary culture that they have essentially given up any hope of influencing the artists who will create the visual images, stories, and music that shape our time.

Few Christians have applied the concept of "stewardship" to culture itself. While it has been natural for Christians to see themselves as stewards of natural resources, or wealth, or the institutional church, there has been little sense of stewardship over our national culture.

Image speaks with equal force and relevance to the secular culture and to the church. By finding fresh ways for the imagination to embody religious truth and religious experience, Image challenges believers and nonbelievers alike.

Orion is a bimonthly, advertising-free magazine devoted to creating a stronger bond between people and nature.

Indeed, reading through the two Good Housekeping issues back to back, it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that, on the whole, American culture is far more child-centered now, in these days of two-income families, than when most women stayed home. If the 1958 Good Housekeeping is any indication, many moms in the June Cleaver era were too busy brushing the nap of their electric blankets to ponder how best to bond with their teens. As women’s time has become more valuable, though, because so many are working, working moms have chosen to spend their limited time not sewing tops for their kids, but playing, talking, and praying with them instead.

Chalk this up, if you will, to deficiencies in my Christian character. But even for those more saintly than myself— and there are a few—the blogosphere inevitably accelerates the pace of debate to the timetable of daily journalism. In terms of how they treat substantive ideas, blogs are not very different from newspapers: they present an idea and then move on, as quickly as possible, to the next idea. Perhaps there can be, later on, some brief acknowledgment that that idea wasn't treated fully and adequately—but, as the newsreel in Citizen Kane reminds us, Time is On The March, and bloggers are under enormous pressure to march along with it.

The New Criterion, now co-edited by the art critic Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, was founded in 1982 by Mr. Kramer and the pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman. A monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, The New Criterion has emerged as America’s foremost voice of critical dissent.

The farm itself, of course, is a model of sustainability. Run by solar and wind energy, it consumes no power from the Ontario Hydro grid. Wood stoves burn wood gathered locally for warmth in winter. The chicken coop and duck house are straw bale constructions and a small hut (the “Cob Cottage” where Brian does his writing) is made from straw and mud. The few head of cattle are Kerry cows—a rare breed from Ireland that is in danger of extinction. They have a giant, diverse vegetable garden, full of tomatoes, raspberries, onions, garlic, cucumbers, brussel sprouts and some long rows of potatoes (the latter of which will be sold to some high end Toronto restaurants who prefer organic vegetables).

In most of the great cities of the West, museums now dominate the lists of most popular tourist attractions. More people go to the Louvre each year than to the Eiffel Tower; in London, three museums--the Tate, the British Museum and the National Gallery--each attract more visitors than the London Eye.

"This boy is a wonderful comedy writer", H.L. Mencken once said of William Faulkner. Yet we seldom associate Faulkner with humour. The term "Faulknerian" tends to connote that blend of Southern gothic tragedy for which the author is most recognised. Many assume that Faulkner's work is little more than lurid tales of burning barns, kitchen castrations and moaning man-children, but this does a disservice to his novels and short stories. It ignores a fundamental aspect of Faulkner's work: the pairing of the comic with the tragic, the screwball with the sordid, the goofy with the grim. It is a rare mix of light and dark, and one that is most closely emulated today in the smart films of Joel and Ethan Coen.

A growing subculture has a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.

A report from the chaotic postfeminist dating scene, where only the strong survive

Inspired by the Canadian blog Bookninja's cover competition, we asked you to redesign a famous novel for a dumbed-down era