Everyone loves Charles Dickens during the holidays, yet no one seems to read him - More Intelligent Life
Online-dating sites have made it easier for people to click with one another. But they still leave something to be desired (6)
The best books of 2010 were about Barack Obama and the secret world of China’s communist rulers, as well as on the spread of surfing, how prosperity evolves, how the West rules (for now) and the travels of the hare with amber eyes (17)
What we wrote when we weren’t in the office (2)
Like its founder, Mediaset is tacky, unfairly advantaged—and resilient (52)
If you can have everything in 57 varieties, making decisions becomes hard work (17)
"I find the middle classes kind of boring. The middle class has kind of been beaten like a dead horse by fictional writers" More »
Love it or hate it, rice pudding responds to careful cooking. Simon Hopkinson shows how More »
Anthony Gardner enjoys his days as a stranded air traveller More »
Why are George W. Bush's book sales so great?
(Salon)
"Decision Points" has already sold more than 2m since it went on sale in November. That's almost as much as Bill Clinton's book has sold since it was released six years ago
Identity politics at the museum
(New York Times)
Two new exhibitions (including one about Muslim science at the New York Hall of Science in Queens) have Edward Rothstein complaining that "the identity exhibition has reached new lows"
The Liszt legacy
(Guardian)
Stephen Hough pays tribute to Franz Liszt, a virtuoso who invented the concept of the pianist as star
"[T]he danger of social media becoming the point of social media—connection for connection's sake, connection to no end—is one museum's need to particularly guard against. Reducing the museum experience to more apps providing more data is just as laughable as reducing the experience of going to church down to parishioners tweeting: 'At church, pastor just mentioned loaves and fishes, anyone have some sushi recs for later?'"
~ Arianna Huffington, "Museums 2.0: What Happens When Great Art Meets New Media?" (Huffington Post)
New research about romantic attraction confirms what mothers have been saying for generations: don't give it all away More »
To grasp an important chapter in the story of writing, look to western, and then eastern, Christianity More »
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What is said of Hopper is true of the greatest art. The edge of cliche, where the artist in crossing that boundary reveals the ordinary to be unfamiliar and most extraordinary, is the place were creativity works most powerfully
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