Journalist "thinking about... birth control and the importance of reproductive freedom" steps in front of a moving car, is saved by Ryan Gosling...

... and is now annoyed that — after she tweeted about her encounter with the cinematic dreamboat — people are going on about his being such...

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

A quote that came up in conversation just now. I had to look it up to get it verbatim and was delighted to see it came from Samuel Johnson ,...

"Can you concentrate on Flaubert when your cute cat is only a few feet away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy when people are swimming in a pool nearby?"

"People who read books on paper are realizing that while they really want to be reading Dostoyevsky, the real world around them is pret...

Switching from paper books to ebooks may turn into a transition away from books altogether.

Once you're on the iPad/Kindle Fire, it's so tempting to do other things too — email, Facebook, Googling here and there — that you l...

"2Ls With Higher LSAT Scores Goof Off More With Laptops in Class, With No Effect on Grades."

Interesting ... but if that's happening in your class, professors, I'd say your class needs to be taught on a more challenging level...

Left-handedness.

From the Wall Street Journal: •Six of the last 12 U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush, have been lefties. • Left-h...

Forget NaNoWriMo. It's AcBoWriMo.

Charlotte Frost declares the first Academic Book Writing Month. (Hey, that's what I meant to do last August!) We are going to wear comf...

"Look, if you put the Internet on the device I am supposed to be using to read, I will never read again."

"Can you blame me? I am only human. I can’t focus. If all these studies about multitasking have taught us anything, it is that we all t...

"Facebook has no charms for me. It looks inward. Twitter looks outward..."

From an essay by Roger Ebert about how the internet rewires our brains . A lot of the essay is about the importance of stepping away from th...

Prosopagnosia.

The inability to recognize faces. People with face blindness can typically understand facially expressed emotions — they know whether a face...

The problems with boys and school.

Melana Zyla Vickers writes in the Weekly Standard about the gender gap in higher education: What is going on? Schools are not paying enough...

"He's a home wrecker. He's trying to rip a father away from a child, and rip a husband away from a wife."

So says a 22-year-old man who married the 14-year-old girl he impregnated. He's being prosecuted for statutory rape. (To marry, they cr...

"Try to survive a tornado with a post-structuralist."

Camille Paglia in Madison. I show up early for the Camille Paglia reading at Borders this evening. The place is packed. I find a seat and th...

Some TV thoughts.

Matt at Throwing Things convinces me to buy the " Wonderfalls " DVD collection: "a snarkier and agnostic variant of 'Joa...