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He is already there reading the sayings of Mao and then — splash — the Parthenon explodes. The Germans make love. Crazed truck drivers armed with pirate's sabers throw empty cans of red paint on the University of Nanterre. She is killed by Australian aborigines. At mad speed to Flins, Pier Paolo Pasolini catches the train and speaks. Two men kill everybody. He reads the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Sade throws a bomb at Madame de Sevigné. He goes away. He watches a Chaplin movie. The natives arrive.

The UK is home to some fairly well-known examples of glaring health inequality. One of the most shocking was exposed in a report from the World Health Organisation in 2008, which stated that Calton in the East End of Glasgow has a male life expectancy of 54 – nine years less than in India. Another well-known fact is that if you get on the tube at Westminster, life expectancy declines by one year for every two stops as you travel out towards the East End. Less well known is that the most spectacular drop in life expectancy in London happens between Victoria and Vauxhall, two stops on the Victoria line: in that journey of just over a mile, life expectancy declines by nine years.

Japan had it all, except, it seemed, tolerance for those middle managers among its ranks seen as hindering the Japanese economic miracle. But a solution was at hand. For managers perceived as soft, indolent or otherwise incompetent, and would-be junior executives not quite ready for prime-time, the answer was a ticket to jigoku no kunren: Hell Camp.

1994 to 2017 and still counting. Also, I never knew this: BECOMING LEVI ASHER. So: goodbye, Levi, hello Marc?

Like a time capsule. But it is for the cool kids (that explains why I was never invited nor even knew about it). Paul Ford is involved. There is some background info.

But the party seems to have ended circa early 2015. Damn. Never the trendsetter I am.

A total metamorphosis isn’t possible in my case. I can write in Italian, but I can’t become an Italian writer. Despite the fact that I’m writing this sentence in Italian, the part of me conditioned to write in English endures. I think of Fernando Pessoa, a writer who invented four versions of himself: four separate, distinct writers, thanks to which he was able to go beyond the confines of himself. Maybe what I’m doing, by means of Italian, resembles his tactic. It’s not possible to become another writer, but it might be possible to become two.

But most of all, the Caravaggio originals in London’s “Beyond Caravaggio” demonstrate why the painter exerted such an overwhelming influence on patrons and colleagues alike, and why he is so passionately loved today. He can paint beautifully most of the time. He produced marvelous compositions of light beaming forth from the darkness, covered his canvases with luminous whites, full-blooded reds, velvet blacks, but above all, especially later in his career, he painted with restraint, and taste, and a gigantic, compassionate heart.

This site currently has 1,608 free high-resolution national park maps to view, save, and download.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

Caltech and The Feynman Lectures Website are pleased to present this online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Now, anyone with internet access and a web browser can enjoy reading a high quality up-to-date copy of Feynman's legendary lectures.

The Internets can be a wonderful thing, sometimes.

The first and by far the most respected of the trilogy, The Matrix “largely interprets Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Imagine a cave. Inside are people who were born and have spent their entire lives there, chained into a fixed position, only able to see the wall in front of them. As far as they know, this is the entire world.” The Wachowskis ask the same question Plato does: “How do we know what our reality really is?”

I always thought myself that the endless pretentious discussions about the "philosophy" of The Matrix are largely conducted by college-age single men who - in slightly different circumstances - would have been obsessing over Madame Rand. I still think the Wachowskis idly paged through some Philo 101 compendium and picked out whatever sounded cool or whatever. Or perhaps just randomly clicked through Wikipedia pages.

The most startling of these is Ford Madox Brown’s watercolour of 1863, entitled Mauvais Sujet, of a young teenage girl who is not so much engagingly naughty as alarmingly bad. The tight format derives from Rossetti’s early oil paintings of female heads and shoulders, such as Bocca Baciata of 1859, paintings of a frank sensuality free of the narcotic eroticism and religiosity that make so much of his later painting seem repellent. But Brown’s schoolgirl subject hasn’t yet led any artist into temptation. She is seated at a high desk with names and doodles scratched on its hinged top. We see the lines she has been made to copy with her quill, black lines which rhyme with the disorder of her hair. Her teeth – brighter than the white of her collar, the plume, the paper or the enamel inkwell – are biting into a brilliantly green apple. Fruit would certainly not have been allowed in the classroom and this young Eve, whose dress is also green, eats it with resentful defiance. The picture has the compositional ingenuity and thrilling compression of Brown’s great circular painting The Last of England – a compression, here greatly enhanced by the original double frame, that we miss in his later work, although he was always attracted both by defiance and by teeth.