Because when countries have monarchs who are related, peace and harmony ensue! Oh wait…

They did a lot of bad stuff, but in terms of colonial powers, they were on the merciful side. Former British colonies on the whole have recovered more than say, Dutch ones — look at Malaysia and Indonesia — it's almost a controlled experiment.

You have to like David Lynch's sendup of small town life (first seen in "Blue Velvet"). As someone who grew up in a small town but has decided that big city living is kind of my thing, I'm of mixed opinion. Yes, small towns aren't nearly as wholesome as they like to appear, but still…

I like both (having relatives who fled East Germany endears me to Deutschland 83, plus they used "99 Luftballoons" and "Major Tom Coming Home", two of my favorite 1980s songs), but I do have to love how Russell and Rhys became an actual couple generating a child — the chemistry wasn't just acting.

And Hamlet may have been a remake of a lost play by Thomas Kyd. Which was taken from the medieval "Gesta Danorum" anyway.

But they still have to fight the forces of Caesar and Mr. House, don't they? I always sided with Mr. House, myself — I liked the robots.

And he won't have to use the "Ken Burns effect" of panning around a still photo/illustration to make it more visually interesting because we actually have video.

A lot of evangelicals believe in the "gospel of wealth" — that is, wealthy people are wealthy because God wanted them to be. Which of course has the flip side of making it okay to ignore the poor because they are obviously bad people.

Exactly. And people like John Dee who were so right about how the future would belong to math and science and even common people who knew no classical languages would need to know it (in his preface to the first English translation of Euclid) while at the same time trying to communicate with angels with a mystical…

I'm a federal employee at a government lab (we'll see how it survives the incoming administration). We have a "winter holiday" party where we actually have to pay $25 bucks for to attend. I am going because my boss says it would look bad if our group didn't make a decent showing at it.

Republicans are actually fond of the jingoistic "space hero" part of NASA. They just don't like sciency part done by nerds on earth using satellite imaging to support global warming and such.

Indeed. Most of what he wrote isn't even controversial — Das Kapital isn't too different from Smith's Wealth of Nations really. Probably only The Communist Manifesto is the only thing that resembles the output of the pop culture caricature of Marx as a wild-eyed revolutionary.

A lot of info dump to support the author's point. I've actually read Darwin's Origin of Species — even most of my biologist colleagues haven't. The thing is, the idea of natural selection is just a small chapter in it — the rest, much like Piketty's book, is describing all the facts he used in his conclusion. Which…

Pretty much all professional economists these days are neoliberals. Even Paul Krugman. They all believe at heart that the basic capitalist structure is sound — the difference is between the ones like Friedman who believe that the government should do little or nothing to regulate markets and those like Piketty and…

Hammett is "pulpier" because that was what he literally was — a pulp writer like his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft — most of his stuff was published as short stories in pulp magazines and many of his novels are just expanding/joining those stories. Chandler was an actual literary author. It's okay to like (and even…

And if they aren't, surely *they* can take vengeance on their own. Assuming they exist. And if they don't, they weren't really sacred rocks in the first place. The idea that people who don't believe in a supernatural phenomenon have to "respect" it is pretty stupid.

If you liked "The Blind Assassin" you should try some Robertson Davies ("Fifth Business" in particular). In "The Blind Assassin" Atwood is basically trying to do an homage to Davies as his books always had a backdrop of Canadian history among the weirdness whereas most of Atwood's books have nothing to do with Canada.

Volume I (the only one really written by Marx) or Vols II and III ("edited" by Engels but basically Marxist fan fiction)?

Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" — a classic book describing the events leading up to WWI. I had wanted to read it in 2014 to match up with the 100th anniversary of the events, but I didn't get around to it, much as how I didn't read many of my acquired Civil War books in the 2011-2015 period of the 150th…

And an American army officer in The Presidio (1988). Where they at least explain the accent by having a scene about how he loves the US because it's a land of opportunity that accepted his father from Scotland and so on.