Terry Teachout explains why brevity can be a virtue in art: The latest alleged trend to set the world in a tizzy is the Crisis of Shorter Attention Spans, a dire development that has been brought about by the rise of the Internet. Or texting. Or iTunes. Or Twitter. Or whatever. I find it hard to get upset about this existential threat to Western civilization, though, perhaps because I’m part of the problem. My attention span is much shorter now... Read more
Greg Johnson (pilot for the shuttle STS-134 mission) and Ron Garan (a former member of the International Space Station crew) explain what type of Internet access astronauts have in space: GREG JOHNSON: As shuttle guys, we really don’t partake in the Internet. We’ve got synchronizations with our emails. It kind of gives us a pseudo-email or pseudo-Internet to communicate with our families and friends and our associates. However, I’m going to pass this to Ronnie because on the station, I... Read more
Note to men: Your pants have been deceiving you for years: The pants manufacturers are trying to flatter us. And this flattery works: Alfani’s 36-inch “Garrett” pant was 38.5 inches, just like the Calvin Klein “Dylan” pants — which I loved and purchased. A 39-inch pair from Haggar (a brand name that out-testosterones even “Garrett”) was incredibly comfortable. Dockers, meanwhile, teased “Leave yourself some wiggle room” with its “Individual Fit Waistline,” and they weren’t kidding: despite having a clear size... Read more
The Social Norm of Leaving the Toilet Seat Down: A Game Theoretic Analysis: The issue of whether the toilet seat should be left up or down after use seemingly generates a lot of passion among the parties concerned, however, scientific inquiries into the matter are almost non-existent. Notable exceptions are Choi (2002) and Harter (2005). Choi (2002) argues that the rule of leaving the toilet seat down after use is inefficient in the sense that there is at least one... Read more
Psychology professor Daniel J. Levitin on the music of the Beatles: A hundred years from now, musicologists say, Beatles songs will be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people won’t know who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they’ve always existed, like “Oh! Susanna,” “This Land Is Your Land” and “Frère Jacques.” Read more
Books are as big as they are because medieval sheep were as big as they were: [M]edieval books are no bigger or smaller than modern books, generally speaking. Gutenberg and the other early printers didn’t invent a whole new format for books, they just copied what people were already using. The question then becomes, I guess, why were medieval books the size they were? And the answer to that is simple: medieval books were the size they were because medieval... Read more
From Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart: The average lawn is an interesting beast: people plant it, then douse it with artificial fertilizers and dangerous pesticides to make it grow and to keep it uniform — all so that they can hack and mow what they encouraged to grow. (p. 33) Read more
Human beings are large ozone sinks: The dead cells that slough off your skin every day pile up in the dust that collects around your home. But this grimy-sounding stuff actually helps clean the air indoors, according to new research. Oil associated with dead skin cells removes the pollutant ozone, a molecule made up of three oxygen atoms. In fact the oil, squalene, reduces indoor ozone levels by about 2 to 15 percent. Its molecules contain six double bonds between... Read more
Author and former literary agent John Hodgman gives tips on how to make it as a writer. Read more
From Colin Woodard’s The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Then Down: The Golden Age of Piracy lasted only ten years, from 1715 to 1725, and was conducted by a clique of twenty to thirty pirate commodores and a few thousand crewmen. Virtually all of the commodores knew one another, having served side by side aboard merchant or pirate vessels or crossed paths in their shared base, the... Read more
Joe Carter
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