Wes Phillips

Gareth Rees calculates that the British archers at Agincourt might have rained 50,000 arrows a minute for a solid eight minutes onto the French. So if you were snorting derisively at the title's combination of "medieval" and "physics," consider this: Agincourt was, essentially, the first battle where conventional cavalry tactics met the equivalent of the machine gun.

I really like this animated short. I don't know who produced it, but he or she tells a nice story in just over two minutes.

. . . Not Huckleberry.

B. S. Prakash muses on what it takes to get into the American labor force. The last line's a kicker.

Mark">http://blog.hometheatermag.com/markfleischmann/">Mark Fleischmann sent this url, asking, "is there a parallel with the audio business here?" Oh really, Mark—how could you think that?

Dr. Anne Newman suggests that a simple test—the ability to briskly walk a quarter of a mile—might be an "important determinant" not only of whether an elderly subject might be alive in six years, but of the illness or disability he or she might experience during that time. Yes, it's a small sample, but I'm going to keep walking.

Chris Hedges writes about writing American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. He has interesting things to say about the "theology of despair" and its conclusion that cataclysmic destruction is preferable to this too flawed world.