Rock'n'Roll Daily
Remember when <I>Rolling Stone</I> actually wrote about music? Me neither.
Wes Phillips
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Oh, Mr. President!
Unconventional portraits of US presidents, the works in <I>Mr. President</I> "run the gamut from irreverent humor to deeply felt homage."
Alan Moore on Pornography
Speaking of having fun . . . .
There's an Upside to Color Blindness?
Researcher Amanda Melin posits that color blindness might be an advantageous adaptation for capuchins hunting camouflaged insects. For us humans? Not so much—"selection pressure for maintaining color vision could have relaxed because it wasn’t a big advantage in the habitat or types of hunting used at the time."
How We Learned to Stop Having Fun
Is depression an epidemic? Barbara Ehrenreich says that the way that depression seemed to sweep across Western Europe in the 17th Century <I>looks</I> like one, but is probably the result of the modern age's celebration of individuality. An increased sense of personal autonomy was accompanied by the loss of communal rituals and festivities that emphasized belonging to communities.
The Psychology of Baseball
Don't let the April 1 dateline throw you. It was also opening day, not just a holiday for the world's fools.
The Archeology of Table Manners
Kate Colquhoun reviews Martin Jones's <I>Feast: Why Humans Share Food</I>. At first I thought the article's title was absurdly inflated, but I was convinced by the time Colquhoun wrote: "To mangle Brillat-Savarin, he dissects not just what early humans ate, but how they ate, in order to draw conclusions about who they were. In the process, he proves once again that food and the ways we have chosen to process and proffer it can be more revealing than any other historical or prehistoric artefact."
Confessions of a Car Salesman
Chandler Phillips thought he was applying to <I>Edmunds.com</I> for a job writing an advice column on buying and leasing cars. The editors had a better idea. They asked him to go undercover and work as a salesman at two lots: a high-pressure import dealership on the "auto mile" and a no-haggle American showroom.
Red State Blues
Michael Ventura gets off the main roads and reports on the state of the union. The kids are leaving.
Tweeter Closes 49 Stores
Tweeter Home Entertainment Group announced a massive "restructuring" of its operations on March 22. The chain will close 49 stores, including all operations in California, New York, Alabama, and Tennessee, and trim its workforce by 20%. The chain's remaining 104 stores will be remodeled to conform to the chain's current "CE playground" theme.