Magnificent Octopus

The One-Straw Revolution , by Masanobu Fukuoka, is a "manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge" that cha...

Persian Ceiling We are using gravity, centrifugal force, the heat, the fire, all of these different elements and in many ways we are not t...

And so when you're working with transparent materials, when you're looking at glass, plastic, ice, or water, you're looking at l...

Another, this time animated, interpretation of Jeremias Gotthelf's story The Black Spider .

The Black Spider , by Jeremias Gotthelf, has an incredibly high creepiness factor. The exceedingly creepy cover should have fully primed my ...

I stumbled across this clip while doing a little background research into The Black Spider , by Jeremias Gotthelf, before I set about writin...

Hans, the husband of the unfortunate woman, had kept his promise all too well. Slowly he had made his way, stopping to contemplate every fie...

Cool math aside, in this TED talk Adam Spencer talks up the power of collaborative mindset and distributed computing projects (such as SET...

Acquired recently at the Antiquarian Book Fair, a pamphlet called The Sexless Dictionary , by John D. Hancock, published by Neuter Press, co...

"My friends, even if understanding is in fact an intellectual process, it is also a spiritual process, because the truths we arrive at ...

First, let me dispose of Socrates because I am sick and tired of this pretense that knowing you know nothing is a mark of wisdom. No one k...

What really counts is less how believable we find the scary thing in the story, but how believable we find the characters who encounter thos...

Will Bellman seems to lead a charmed life. Despite starting out with a few marks against him, life is relatively easy (though he works hard)...

My daughter is under the weather and has stayed home from school yesterday and today (and I've stayed with her). She's relatively se...

Posters around town are informing me that it's saison de la lecture . (As if I need a PSA to tell me that the cooling nights are perfect...

Today's issue of Shelf Awareness dedicated to Rizzoli 's Ex Libris imprint delighted me because it features two of my favourite Ita...

In my first days in Jerusalem, I thought about the secret of pilgrimage and asked myself what drove me out of my native country and brought ...

Famous men read famous poetry . I am partial to Ben Whishaw's reading of La Belle Dame Sans Merci: Other standouts on BlackBook...

Sleep is a divine gift without which the world would go raving mad. Everything in the universe sleeps, wakes up and sleeps again, except our...

Yes, she thought, this is one reason I always come back to these beds, because intimacy changes the scale of the universe, folding down the ...