This past couple of weeks I sipped from the well of erudition. Professor Leonard Barkan, of Princeton University, gave the 2011 Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome, and his topic was Unswept floor: food culture and high culture, antiquity and renaissance.

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US States that voted Republican in 2008 "are now the biggest losers in the fight against childhood obesity," and yet they are also the states that most reject efforts to reduce obesity.

To me, the interesting thing about this table is what we public health people call “tracking.”  Obesity tracks...

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Philippe Starck knocks 'em dead at TedTalk 2007. And all the time I'm watching, I'm thinking, "is this possibly how Eddie Izzard comes over in France?". Laughs, yes, and pathos too, but somewhere, deep beneath the surface, some rather stimulating ideas.

Here's the introduction to a rather nice reader's story that Andrew Tobias put on his blog:

This past Christmas Day I was home cooking for my husband when I saw a news report about a grass roots organization operating here in Atlanta, the Global Soap Project. It was founded by a man named D...

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Living by the precepts of Getting Things Done requires sorting things into one of four piles: Delete, Do, Delegate, Defer. Which is fine, as far as it goes, although you do need to stay on top of Delegate and Defer. The problem is that Google, and in particular GMail and Reader, make it so very ea...

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