Culture and Society

This is a freaky little blast of ephemera from iFilm (view here). In 1964, Jim Morrison appeared an earnest, clean-cut and perplexed prospective Florida State University student turned down for admission because there just wasn’t enough money to go around, in an odd bit of black-and-white propaganda produced by the …

Blogs are wonderful, but there are millions of them, and how do you find like-minded souls among the multitudes? Like many bloggers, I suspect, my initial discoveries were random, but I soon learnt to follow others’ blogrolls. But after a while that becomes horribly circular. One way to break out …

275,000 images, from Civil War photographs, illuminated manuscripts, and Japanese prints, to New York City views, early American maps, and much more are now available free online. A treasury of images from the collections of The New York Public Library is accessible free of charge over the Internet starting today …

Convicted federal Internet movie pirate found dead in his cell in Los Angeles. Russell William Sprague, 52, was the Chicago man who pleaded guilty in April to one count of copyright infringement for duplicating 134 screener movies originally sent to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences …

In papers to be filed today, an artist’s group is backing file sharing service Grokster against the entertainment industry in a critical copyright case before the Supreme Court, scheduled to begin March 29. Background On December 10, 2004 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the entertainment industry’s case against two …

The ailing, 84 year-old Pope John Paul ll may not be doing much public speaking — ever — following a tracheotomy (a small opening cut into the neck and windpipe, with a breathing tube inserted into it so air can flow directly into the lungs) yesterday to alleviate a breathing …

In a fascinating, counterintuitive finding (for Americans, anyway), Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California in Berkeley, found that the British have much more expressive smiles than Americans: British smile by pulling our lips back and upwards and exposing our lower teeth, Americans are more likely simply …

What is the future of the newspaper? The Bad: the “evening paper” was killed off in the ’70s and ’80s. The circulation of morning papers has dropped annually since 1987, Sunday papers since 1990. For example, the Washington Post has seen average daily circulation drop from 779,898 to 709,500 in …

5,000 hours of White House conversations

As a city cyclist, one of the banes of my existence is ridiculously large vehicles, particularly 4WDs. (SUVs in American parlance.) Many of their drivers seem utterly unaware of the poor visibility of these hulks, or indeed even of their real size – near had my shoulder taken off by …