A quick skip-and-jump through some recent items of interest...
- Bertrand Russell's An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (probably public domain). Even if you're no fan of Russell's stances on religion, his reasoning for each of his points is defended with spirit and wit. "Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."
- What happens when Einstürzende Neubauten meets Bo Diddley?
- The Pixar Touch talks about how the little CGI company that ... well, didn't do very much at first eventually turned into a behemoth that gobbled Disney -- and for the better. If WALL-E is all it's cracked up to be, it might well turn out to be a movie we could come back to in a century and not feel like we've lost any of it along the way.
- John Tierney tackles that whole Malthusian "do we starve or turn into android gods?" world-future dilemma. My take: Based on what we've seen so far, we're not going to see Utopia -- it's more like we'll get pockets of closely-guarded stability surrounded by a whole lot of dreary waste and flashpoint violence. In other words, probably nothing terribly unlike what we have now.
- And oh god, how could I forget this piece on Tatsuya Nakadai, the greatest Japanese actor apart from Toshiro Mifune? (Ran in HD now seems more mandatory than ever.)
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