Dogged by weeks of protest, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit finally took down the controversial advertisements from its buses this past weekend. Purchased by a local abuse shelter, the ads featured a young schoolgirl who blithely predicted, “One day my husband will kill me.” Journalist Helen Smith...

Craig Blomberg, here, points out a major misstep in an what sounds to be an otherwise well-documented, detailed examination of Herod the Great and the discovery of his tomb approximately 1 1/2 years ago. Blomberg highlights the problematic statement: But, gratutiously, and highlighted by a quotation...

Continuing from yesterday's post about Gladwell's new book, which is basically an inventory of all the things besides individual talent and initiative that lead to unusual success. Put another way, it's a book about unequal opportunity--how individual success and failure are a product of external c...

The Christian life is not to be attempted, but rather enjoyed.  I believe that this is the point at which we misrepresent Christ to the world.  If all they see is frustrated, striving sheep -- trying to “will themselves” into living the Christian life -- then we’ve missed the boat....

Malcom Gladwell's new book, Outliers, was released last week. I read it over the weekend, on the theory that I had roughly 60 days--90 at the outside--before I'd heard it referenced at so many conferences that mere mention of the central anecdotes would cause me to reach for a hotel pen and stab mys...

From Serious Eats Remember these guys? Of course you do. There may well be a box stuffed in the back of your freezer—even if it’s been there since 1994. Back in my freezer-breakfast days, Eggo made one thing: waffles. And they looked just like this. (Except for the Guitar Hero ad.) But these day...

The Family Place, an abuse shelter in Dallas, recently placed race-baiting advertisements on local buses. The ads depict a smiling African-American girl crowned with a tiara who innocently predicts, “One day my husband will kill me.” Barbara Kay of the National Post charged the ads were “outri...

It's commonly believed that higher education suffers from an acute case of "Baumol's Cost Disease," an affliction that causes labor-intensive industries to become less productive over time. It takes a professor just as long to deliver a 90-minute lecture today as it did 100 years ago, the thinking g...

 I have been sick.  Crappy, cruddy, crappy crap crap. I think, please oh please, that I have taken a turn for the better.  I am at least no longer falling asleep while listening to people talk or while walking down the hallway, and I don't feel like my glands are trying to make...

Thursday morning I talked with composer Terry Riley , who is in New York this week to collaborate with the Bang on a Can All-Stars in the US premiere of his work Autodreamographical Tales at Le Poisson Rouge on 8 November . Riley is famous for being one of the “Big Four” of American minimalist c...