Your shrinking brain.

So alcohol, it turns out, does not kill brain cells , according to the NYT. But a study associated back pain with brain shrinkage. And anot...

"The artful, undulant array of organ pipes captivated."

The NYT appreciates the pipe organ and the Overture Center that houses it, here in Madison.

Oliver Stone's new rant.

I have a new entry in my running account of Oliver Stone's attempts to prepare the American people for his grand opus "Alexander....

Christo.

Drudge is linking to this AP story headlined "Christo to Wrap Central Park in Fabric." Look at Christo's beautiful web page ...

TV on DVD.

Tomorrow the new "Seinfeld" DVD collection comes out and Entertainment Weekly is recommending it because you'll get to see th...

Desperate moral values.

The NYT, in a front page article, searches for meaning : if a lot of the voters in the last election polled that they cared about "mora...

Doodle of the day.

Those religion-oriented law schools.

The NYT reports on the new religion-oriented law schools. "The prevailing orthodoxy at the elite law schools is an extreme rationalism...

"We're the good guys."

The NYT directs us to the web posting of the cameraman who photographed the shooting of the wounded Iraqi in Fallujah last week. Here is t...

George Carlin.

George Carlin was on Tim Russert's CNBC show this weekend, promoting his book " When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops ." The sh...

"I loved Tang and I would sometimes eat it by the teaspoon, straight from the jar."

So writes Augusten Burroughs in the first true story in his new book "Magical Thinking." He's a school kid at the time, excit...

Tilt-a-Whirl.

Nice photo sequence !

That unidentified saucer.

Last spring, I had a temporary copy of the program iBlog, and I started a second blog, which I kept up until the software expired. But I sti...

Journey through the NYT completed ahead of schedule.

For some reason, I'm through the whole pile by 10 a.m. Only the crossword puzzle is left. I feel like the weekend has an extra day to it...

The intense sexual politics of the new literature Nobelist.

Elfriede Jelinek interviews : I describe the relationship between man and woman as a Hegelian relationship between master and slave. As long...

Filibustering.

You can't have a piece about the filibuster without a picture of Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," a film tha...

"Intelligent design is creationism in a cheap tuxedo."

A school district in Pennsylvania has authorized teaching "a new theory called intelligent design" to balance the teaching of evo...

Wisconsin plays defense against California... over stem-cell research.

When California voters authorized spending $3 billion on stem-cell research, that put pressure on Wisconsin, where stem-cell research origin...

"I have always thought of New England as the last death-free zone in the United States."

So says a lawprof and former capital defense lawyer. Connecticut faces the fact that it has the death penalty: Beyond resurrecting the vici...

A Whitmoresque Bush.

Wow , kind of like President Thomas J. Whitmore having to do everything himself.

Doodle of the day.

Let's just start off with the drawing, photographed on the window sill next to where I'm planning to sit all morning reading the Sun...

Political humor of the maitre d' kind.

Gawker prints this "Gawker Stalker" item sent in by a reader: Freemans, tuesday night the 16th of nov. the bush twins , along wi...

It doesn't seem right to root for Ohio State...

Over my undergraduate school Michigan. But thanks, Buckeyes . And go, Badgers. UPDATE: AAAAGGGHHHH! That was grim!

Life is a sport.

At the moment, one of the listings on the sports page of Google News is: Oldest man dies at 113 CBC Montreal - 3 hours ago SYRACUSE, NY - Th...

Out-of-touch Hollywood.

On last night's episode of "Joan of Arcadia," Joan's boyfriend said to her: "So what if you don't make Ivy League...

Doodle of the day.

This one wasn't drawn today, but it looks like the ones drawn yesterday and the day before. And it is photographed on today's paper:

Oliver Stone conquers the New York Times.

The NYT is helping Oliver Stone lay the foundation for the excuse he's planning to use when his movie "Alexander" bombs. (I p...

Kerry credits bin Laden.

How awful of John Kerry to give Osama bin Laden credit for determining the outcome of the election! I'm sure bin Laden appreciates your...

Just when I thought I was out...

I watched "The Apprentice" again! I had stopped watching it. Prof. Yin even blogged about how I'd stopped watching it! Well,...

400 greatest movie quotes.

It takes a while to read through all 400 quotes nominated as greatest movie quotes by the American Film Institute, which Throwing Things th...

Doodle of the day.

Drawn during a presentation about voting rights, at noon today, in the faculty library:

"Irritable Male Syndrome."

I think what we need is a term for the syndrome that involves coming up with a memorable but annoying name for a banal observation in order ...

Local radio guy slurs Condoleezza Rice.

Here's the Wisconsin State Journal coverage of the story about Madison talk radio host "Sly" (John Sylvester). Note how glori...

At the library.

Most interesting paragraph in Todd Purdum's account (in the NYT) of President Bush's remarks at the opening of President Clinton...

The Mel Gibson movie-making model.

You may remember that Mel Gibson put up $20 million of his own money to make "The Passion of the Christ." But do you realize that ...

Doodle of the day.

Drawn on page B11 of today's NYT, the page facing the crossword puzzle and the Alessandra Stanley review of the new Carrie Fisher talk ...

Abused by blogs.

Last night I had a blogger dinner with two bloggers who have in the past taken down posted statements after I've linked to them and a th...

Presidential umbrellas.

Can't someone find a real umbrella for these men? Those short-handled, foldable ones look absurd on anyone, but if two Presidents are g...

Augusten Burroughs.

Augusten Burroughs was just on Fresh Air. You can listen to the interview here . The show ends with him explaining how he changed his name a...

2000 nostalgia.

Yesterday, Best of the Web wrote about nostalgia for the 2000 election. History repeats itself, as Karl Marx observed, first as tragedy, th...

Can that kid get his quarters back?

U.S. News reports that Democrats are a bit irked about how much money Kerry has left over from the campaign. "Democrats are questionin...

Oliver Stone's preemptive strike.

Here's how it looks to me. Oliver Stone's big, expensive, horribly bad movie "Alexander" is about to come out, and Stone i...

The political structure of academia.

The NYT reports on a study that shows (unsurprisingly) that Democrats greatly outnumber Republicans in academia. The ratio is 7 to 1, gener...

A glance at the Clinton Library.

When I first glanced at this photograph of the inside of the Clinton Library (I didn't see the headline, just the picture), I thought: ...

What really sets us apart from the apes.

"Have you ever looked at an ape?" Dr. Bramble said. "They have no buns." Dr. Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah...

Teaching evolution.

In my Religion and the Constitution class this week we're talking about a favorite topic of mine: teaching evolution in the public schoo...

And what about Condoleezza Rice?

Having just relayed the NYT description of Kerry's lonely lunch, let me pass along the description (by Elisabeth Bumiller) of the Condo...

What is Kerry doing these days?

He's back in the Senate, the NYT reports in this nicely written article by Todd S. Purdum: Mr. Kerry attended the morning caucus in the...

"It's okay to eat fish, 'cause they don't have any feelings."

So sang Kurt Cobain , not so many years ago. But now PETA says they do have feelings. (Via Drudge . Hey, do we have to "via" Drud...

Time's Person of the Year.

Hasn't it been leadenly obvious for the past two weeks that George Bush will be Time Magazine's Person of the Year? But Time ran a p...

The swimming pool boondoggle.

Madison has five lakes and many beaches, and it has private swimming pools that are undersubscribed, not to mention a short swimming season...

Beatles Faux Sale!

My son John responds to the previous post: The decision to release the American albums does not "make the most sense"; it distorts...

"'Something New'? That can't be a Beatles album because we have all the Beatles albums and we don't have that."

That's something that a Generation Y-er said to me a few years ago. And my own son likes to say to me, when I say something like, "...

"The Life Aquatic," "The Royal Tenenbaums," "Nico Icon," "Between the Buttons."

I'm so looking forward to the new Wes Anderson movie, "The Life Aquatic" -- which has a cool webpage -- that I got out the ol...

"Beavers weave stolen cash into dam."

Yes, that happened : A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the ...

So: Condoleezza Rice for President in '08.

ABC News reports : National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, one of President Bush's closest counselors, will be nominated to replace ...

The chaplain's view of Iraq.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a story about a Wisconsin native who serves as a U.S. Army chaplain in Iraq: [Ken] Sorenson said he had ...

"We have been silent enough."

The Washington Post has a compelling account from one of the 2000 Iraqi soldiers who fought with U.S. troops against the insurgents in Fall...

A woman's view of Carville's smashing that egg on his face.

Okay, it was pretty funny when James Carville smashed a raw egg on his face on "Meet the Press" yesterday. It's hard to do se...

Interesting times ahead.

Bush is buoyant , Colin Powell is resigning , Arafat is still dead, there was quick victory in Fallujah, new places may open on the Suprem...

"Had we done in April what we did now, the results would've been the same."

Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, who designed the ground attack on Fallujah, describes the brilliant, ahead-of-schedule takeover of the c...

Are the blue-state secessionists learning they love federalism?

Andrew Sullivan is promoting this Dan Savage piece and this article in the Stranger, both of which go on about various liberal urban area...

Politics and storytelling.

Rational Explications had a post (via Instapundit ) a few days ago that sorted occupations into two columns. Column A listed several occupa...