"No Amount of Alcohol is Good for You--That Much is Clear"
The idea that moderate drinking is healthy has been debunked . . . currently
Topic
Briefly
A collection of 249 issues
Capitalism and Communism are Flipsides of the Same Coin?
Rod Dreher calls Niall Ferguson's first column for The Free Press a "banger" and he's right.
Ferguson highlights an alarming number of similarities between the last years of the Soviet Union and the United States today. Does it mean the United States is reaching
Rationalized Ideals of Silence Crashing Against the Rock of Reality
Or rather, "Rationalized Ideals AGAINST Silence Crashing . . . ".
Knowledge Through Experience is Still Knowledge
Black Magic and Scientism
Magic has fascinated me since I learned that the high watermark of magic was the Renaissance. The cutting-edge Renaissance thinkers were magicians. Magic and science were intertwined, its practitioners flitting between the two practices (arts) in their attempt to understand and, ultimately, control/manipulate the world, unaware that they
Why Gardening Matters
Hemispheres in the Garden
The left hemisphere plans, incidentally. The right hemisphere flows.
Carol Deppe draws an autobiographical distinction in The Tao of Vegetable Gardening between "Planning Carol" and "Doing Carol." PC lays out elaborate plans that DC later disregards as she gardens. I can relate . . . big-time. Deppe'
The Cell Phone is a Monkey Trap for the Left Hemisphere
And Eight Other Short Observations about the Hemispheres
The Left Hemisphere Thwarts Focus: On Art Appreciation
Attention, attention, attention.
Everyone is starved for it . . . their own, not others. People want to be able to focus again.
Madison Avenue purposefully kills it:
The legal scholar Tim Wu, in his book “The Attention Merchants,” notes, “Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the
The World of Wine Collecting
It's a combination of pretension, mystery, investment, viticulture, vinification, historical appreciation, and fraud.
The world of wine collecting. The world of the 1%. Scratch that. The 1/10th of one percent.
It sounds like oenophiles work with vintners to create a buzz about a new wine, one that