To anybody who saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as a child, Pythagoras's 2,500-year-old intuition that astronomy and music must be intertwined seems self-evident. The opening minute of 2001 is set to the thunderous "Sunrise" sequence of Also sprach Zarathustra, Richard ...
MIT's Daron Acemoglu is a rock star among economists, one of the ten most cited in his profession. This is largely because of the paper the Istanbul-born Armenian cowrote in 2001: The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development. Other economists have found that it provides a suave way to finally ...
In his impressive first book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, entrepreneur/intellectual Jim Manzi has the makings of an airport best seller in the genre of Steven Levitt's Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Indeed, Uncontrolled is ...
The Dictator is Sacha Baron Cohen's fourth and"surprisingly"funniest movie, a definite improvement over his biggest hit Borat. But critics, who raved in 2006 about how Borat exposed the anti-Semitism throbbing in Red State America's heart, are now having second thoughts about Baron Cohen's ...
In Tom Stoppard's 1982 drama The Real Thing, a middle-aged playwright and his daughter discuss Elvis Presley's death: Henry: I never went for him much. "All Shook Up" was the last good one. However, I suppose that's the fate of all us artists. Debbie: Death? Henry: People saying they ...
It was a bad weekend for Nicolas "The American in Paris" Sarkozy but a great weekend at the global box office for what the French sniffily call l"empire américain's hyperpuissance. Marvel's The Avengers, a comic-book movie featuring a half-dozen old-fashioned superheroes such as ...
I"m not known as a reliable source of racetrack tips, so if you are headed to Churchill Downs for this Saturday's 138th running of the Kentucky Derby, please don"t take this column as advice to wager heavily on Hansen at 14 to 1 odds. In early spring, Hansen was the Derby favorite, but a ...
The most intriguing gossip about Tiger Woods in a new tell-all book by his ex-swing coach is that at the height of his career in 2006-07, the world's highest-paid athlete seriously considered quitting golf to take up a radically different career. That got me thinking about neighborhood-watch ...
Baseball season reminds us of the identity-politics group that doesn"t bark"left-handers. Why are certain aggregations of once-persecuted people such as blacks or gays so politically potent today, while others such as left-handers can be safely ignored? Indeed, it's almost gauche to ask ...
Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon, 2012. The Derbyshire Affair, America's latest Two Minutes Hate over race, provides a fresh example with which to assess social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's framework for why some people are ...
