Here’s something curious. I have no idea if this video — allegedly taken from a camera being snaked through a sewer line in North Carolina — is real or fake, or, if real, whther it depicts something already well-known or utterly strange. What the hell are these things? They look like mighty good eatin’. Read Full Story

It is morning again, and I am back at my desk (technically speaking, it was also morning when I left). Although it has been heavy slogging these past six weeks or so, with many long nights of darkness both inner and outer, today there grows within me a slender reed of hope, a delicate wisp of a thing that is nevertheless almost eschatological in its import, that by Friday there may be deliverance. Outwardly I am silent, laboring in my little cell and gazing fixedly at the screen as always, ... Read Full Story

Once again, it is approaching midnight, and I am still at the office, lashed to the wheel. This should not last much longer, I hope — perhaps things will be back to normal next week — but for now, serious bloggery remains entirely out of the question. Fortunately, you needn’t turn away empty handed, for just this minute my estimable colleague Yaniv Sarig has seen fit to leaven my toil by emailing me an amusing clip from YouTube. If you have ever wondered just where, exa... Read Full Story

Today we offer a heaping helping of heresy, cooked up by some of our hardest-hitting, highest-profile heathens. First, as a little amuse-bouche, we have a recent editorial by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, in which the author argues that, despite conciliatory efforts to get “militant” atheists to stop being such party-poopers, the fact is that religion and science are not just, as Stephen Jay Gould famously called them, “non-overlapping magisteria” — but ... Read Full Story

Readers will have noticed that output has fallen off drastically here lately; the demands of the workplace have continued to press heavily upon me. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, however, and in fact I am actually spending this weekend doing things other than writing and debugging program code — and may even, before long, have the little grey cells back in sufficent working order to start scribbling tendentious poppycock at the usual rate once again. But for tonigh... Read Full Story

We have all had the harrowing suspicion, rising at times almost to a dreadful certainty, that the inanimate objects of the world are arrayed against us with bloodless and implacable malice. We pop the window open on a fine spring morning and it falls back down, shattering the glass. We grab the only pencil at hand in urgent haste to write down a number before it flies from our memory, and the point breaks off. We lift a jar of mayonnaise by its lid, which comes off in our hand; the jar smash... Read Full Story

French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced yesterday that the burqa — the head-to-toe garment worn by some Muslim women — is “not welcome” in France, and the French National Assembly is now preparing an inquiry into whether the enshrouding of women to shield them from the view of men other than their owners is so fundamentally at odds with Western secular culture that it should be outlawed. In his words: The problem of the burka is not a religious problem. This is... Read Full Story

We’re talking about opinions, of course. Here are two takes on the situation in Iran: from Fouad Ajami, and from Pat Buchanan. And if you have a little more time, and would like to be better informed about elections in Iran generally, and about that nation’s political structure, read this. Related content from Sphere This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Foreign Affairs. You can follow any responses to this ... Read Full Story

As the situation in Iran devolves further into violence, we note that two Ph.D. candidates at Columbia have done some clever statistical work on the official election results, and have concluded that they are almost certainly fake. Story here. Read Full Story

We’ve been on the road for the past two days, and have just got home late on this Sunday evening. There’s been no time for keeping up with events, or for the brooding and rumination necessary for the germination of a serious post. So here’s another pungent item plucked from the ether by our reader JK, who clearly has a knack for digging up this kind of stuff. It’s about preacher Mark Driscoll, who wants to see our better halves fully committed to doing the Lord’... Read Full Story