I'M REVOLTING

Loneliness does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important, said Carl Jung.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness, said David Foster Wallace.

We're all in this alone, said Lily Tomlin.

Foraging for thimbleberries and gooseberries >> more

Rodney King engaged to "juror number 5" from his trial against the city of Los Angeles >> more

Combat meals >> more

The "exaggerated passion of adolescence": breaking into pools, drinking beer, driving beat-up old cars at night while reading aloud from a quiz in a women's magazine >> more

Degrees of beef marbling >> more

Crimes punishable by death in China include smuggling gold and passing forged checks >> more

Next edition of Oxford English Dictionary (third edition) will also be the last edition >> more

Guerrilla bike lane >> more

Types of bitches >> more

Photographs of slime molds >> more

The phenomenology of ugly >> more

Envy, or, dating Jonathan Franzen: ". . . what did his success prove if not that when the gift is prodigious enough, the world does need us?" >> more

Nine-day traffic jam >> more

Neuroscientist who studies the brains of psychopaths discovers he has the brain of a psycopath -- and is related to Lizzy Borden >> more

Chemical reason secondhand bookstores smell like "good quality vanilla absolute" >> more

"Freedom to do whatever we want and the freedom to not matter" >> more

Company hides opt-out clause in online legal disclaimer giving them ownership of your immortal soul >> more

Former food critic lives off $200 a month in food stamps >> more

Films that most frequently use the word "fuck" >> more

U.S. government's list of street terms for "pot" >> more

Bespoke, handknit sweaters >> more

Plans for a gay bar next door to the mosque near Ground Zero >> more

Spelling bee for cheaters >> more

Stereotyping people by their favorite indie bands >> more >> more

Mongolian neo-Nazi group Tsagaan Khass ("White Swastika") >> more

Salvador Dali had a pet anteater >> more

Triceratops may have never existed >> more

U.S. states in which it is illegal to collect rainwater >> more

"People tell me, 'Your website makes me feel okay with collecting weird things, being messy, having weird shoes'" >> more

Items seized at New York's JFK airport >> more

Leaning Tower of Pisa has stopped leaning >> more

Origin of currency symbols >> more

Emailing while sleeping >> more

"Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question claims to originality: Is a creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor?" >> more

Russian speakers are better able to visually distinguish shades of blue than English speakers >> more

Portion sizes in depictions of the Last Supper have doubled since Medieval period >> more

On the menu at the Last Supper: grilled eel and orange slices >> more

Indigo dying DIY >> more

Laver's law: the lifecycle of fashion >> more

Olivier Theysken's corner deli shopping list >> more

Jeffrey Eugenides: "Bellow was good at writing about himself, but not me. I don’t know who I am." >> more

South pole of Jupiter >> more

Researchers create 'lesbian' mice by deleting a single gene >> more

Chicken came before the egg >> more

Live in a museum for a month >> more

Appeals court rejects FCC policy on "fleeting expletives" >> more

“I don’t even like to look at albums of my kids when they were little. This is today. Once it’s over, it’s over.” >> more

Al Qaeda launches English-language online magazine >> more

Iran bans the mullet >> more

"The idea that artists can treat the city like a canvas ends up suggesting that it is a lost cause, an entire metropolitan area written off as raw material for upcycling." >> more

Michael Jackson's patent for anti-gravity shoes >> more

It's true what he said: I often like the idea of a thing more than the thing itself >> more

Intellectual property among chefs >> more

Islands for sale >> more
Woodlands for sale >> more

eBay price guide for first issues of magazines >> more

Locked, writers-only private room in the New York Public Library >> more

Craving sassafras twig syrup: "Think root beer with a lot of lemon in it." >> more

"'Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.' So is vomiting." >> more

Map of public art in Los Angeles >> more

What happened to King Tut's penis? >> more

Raids on illegal pinatas >> more

Landlocked countries >> more

Female, non-white Marvel superheroes >> more

There are more Ethiopian doctors practicing in Chicago than in all of Ethiopia >> more

We experience greater pain when we believe it to be intentionally inflicted, rather than by accident >> more

"Sometimes, we simply like pain; it confirms our sense of how the world is. . . . it appeals to our essentialism, our preference for the authentic . . . the quality of being profoundly true to life." >> more

Headless rooster lives for 18 months after non-lethal decapitation >> more

Contest: Turn your dissertation into an interpretive dance >> more

"When I can’t sleep, I think about what I’m missing. . . . I wonder what I would be dreaming about, if only I could fall asleep." >> more

Reuters working with Adobe on Photoshop component that would record changes made to photographs >> more

Video of world record-setting free dive >> more

Hebrew University owns the rights to Albert Einstein's likeness >> more

Make something cool everyday >> more

Street vendors without a license in New York City can legally sell books and art >> more

Why Los Angeles is no place for a poet >> more

Displaying sun-faded paintings in a state of "simulated newness" >> more

As evidenced by my "About" section, I'm a big fan of subject postponement >> more

Frank Gehry: LEED certification has become fetishized, like "if you wear an American flag on your lapel." >> more

Supreme Court closes front door: "We are becoming a nation of moles, timorous creatures who scurry through side and subterranean entrances." >> more

Top 40 magazine covers of the last 40 years >> more

Kathleen Hanna bequeaths her papers to NYU, for the university library's Riot Grrrrl Collection >> more

The business of poverty >> more

Monkeys writing Shakespeare: "The appeal . . . has never had anything to do with monkeys, but rather with the notion of greatness through infinity." >> more

Fourteen-year-old Malcolm Gladwell running in a 1,500 meter race >> more

Portraits of rural Africans: one in typical poverty pose and one dressed “wochena” (“dressed to kill”) >> more

"Would you pay $109 for a notebook? >> more

The New York Times bans the word "tweet" >> more

Squid ink buns, taro rolls and sea salt lattes >> more

Columbia University Press to publish David Foster Wallace's undergraduate thesis >> more

Keanu Reeves is super-nice >> more

Reverse engineering McDonald's french fries >> more

The four signs of the apocalypse: "formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism" >> more

Shaquille O'Neal curates art exhibit about size >> more

Most bohemian cities in the United States, according to Richard Florida >> more

Should affirmative action consider class instead of race? >> more

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service auctions items seized from illegal animal trade >> more >> more

"Introverts are people who find other people tiring" >> more

Philosophy classes on YouTube >> more

Caviar vending machine in Moscow >> more

Free mini-album of collected sounds by Jarvis Cocker >> more

Black American babies cost $8,000 less to adopt than Hispanic or white babies; girls cost $2,000 more than boys >> more

Koreans and Greeks work the most: Average hours worked per year, by country >> more

Heinz ketchup changing its recipe for first time in 60 years >> more

Each 100 point increase in a woman's SAT score increases compensation for egg donation by $2,350 >> more

Stealing tiny fragments from priceless works of art >> more

Noam Chomsky denied entry into Israel >> more

Should artists have a right to a share of the profits from resale of their work? >> more

"Daria: The Complete Animated Series" released on DVD >> more

Fashion Law Institute, finally >> more

Subway applies to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for exclusive use of the term "footlong" >> more

Last Jew in Afghanistan >> more
Last of the Asian Godfathers >> more

Woolly mammoths had antifreeze blood >> more

Imelda Marcos running for congress >> more

NASA logo known in-house as "the meatball" >> more

Newsweek is for sale >> more

Hirshhorn Museum director asks staff to help make the lobby/gift shop look busy during donor visit >> more

Only 20 percent of the salt on a potato chip dissolves on the tongue; the rest is ingested with no contribution to taste >> more

On the duty to be happy: "How did we become unhappy about not being happy?" >> more

Blood type discrimination in Japan >> more

Peter Singer advocated eating oysters in Animal Liberation >> more

Lead a tour of something, somewhere: "Going Places, Doing Stuff" call for proposals >> more

How do you pronounce "Moleskine"? >> more

Somewhere in the world there is a sunset right now >> more

Sound of space dust colliding with Earth's ionosphere >> more

Ramp season! >> more

The words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary >> more

Why are there so few female critics? >> more

Well-deserved Pulitzer Prize >> more

Does anyone care about the World Expo? >> more

"I Love You, Phillip Morris" trailer >> more

Shyness as a preoccupation with the self: "At the very least, if you’re shy, you’re never bored" >> more

History of Prussian blue, the first synthetic color >> more

Cake vs. pie bracket >> more
Tournament of books >> more

Writers' day jobs >> more

Ai Weiwei spends eight hours a day on Twitter >> more

The courage of the present >> more

Soldiers in Afghanistan wash their clothes in cement mixers >> more

Off-menu fast food items >> more

"You know that feeling when you see a little tennis star, she’s trying really hard and she breaks your heart. I don’t think you find that in women’s publishing at the moment, there isn’t a general enthusiasm for people" >> more

Condolence gift bag for Oscar nominees who didn't win includes one-year supply of Altoids and African safari >> more

China's latest fashion icon: the "Handsome Vagabond" >> more

“Broadly speaking, girl groups correlate with economic expansion, boy bands with stagnation" >> more

The pleasures of boredom >> more

Kit Kat flavors worldwide, including Salt-Watermelon and Chestnut >> more

"Real criticism is not about distinguishing good from bad; it is about distinguishing good from great. . . . The curse of our time, in the arts, is mediocrity and ordinariness . . ." >> more

Transcriptions of a sleeptalker >> more

Rejected New York Times slogans: "Always decent; never dull" >> more

Taxing the human body >> more

NBA projects losses of $400 million next year, says David Stern >> more

Job opening: Obama's twitterer >> more

Buy seeds and grow your own Nicotiana Tabacum >> more

Intersex people aren't allowed to serve in the U.S. military >> more

Art idea #21: Pour a glass of water to look at. Brilliant >> more

Five cent shopping bags and behavioral economics >> more

Is this work of art really "uncollectable"? Or just always on sale? >> more

Rebel artist's tragic ending >> more

After five years of deliberate spending, works by women now account for 17 percent of Centre Pompidou's collection >> more

Top corporate and special-interest donors to federal-level politics >> more

In the history of material culture, the Makapansgat pebble represents "the birth of want" >> more

What typeface are you? >> more

History of the ampersand >> more

"Can we ever find 'perfection' or 'certainty' or 'truth'? No! Then let us stop using such words in our formulations.": An argument for eliminating all forms of the verb "to be" >> more

How to guarantee your luggage won't be lost >> more

There are 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow. Some have even learned how to ride the Metro >> more

New book about the Getty: "Chasing Aphrodite: Decline and Fall of the World's Richest Museum" >> more

Snowballs made by wind >> more

In defense of a "general and massive easing-up on widows and orphans" >> more

How to be insulting without being ill-bred, or, the only thing written by Bertrand Russell that I've ever wanted to read >> more

Bravo announces new reality show competition for artists >> more

Roman dialect has word to describe the act of stabbing someone in the butt >> more

Neanderthals wore make-up and were thus "capable of symbolic thinking" >> more

On art projects that are never completed: "It is the “unbuilt” or unfulfilled nature of the future that drives manifestos" >> more

Helvetica in Arabic >> more

State of Illinois sued for serving prison inmates too much soy >> more

Dim sum visual dictionary >> more

Say what you will about Adam Gopnik, this line is sticking: "To trust in luck is to be courageous, and courage, the one essential virtue, on which all others depend, is also the one ambiguous virtue . . ." >> more >> more

"Life Before Death": Walter Schel's photographs of people before and right after they have died >> more

The morality of selling babies >> more

Sensor-studded clothing that records domestic violence >> more

The only writer to graduate from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters >> more

"I will seriously consider eliminating the penny," Obama said >> more

Walking drunk vs. driving drunk vs. biking drunk >> more

Journalism corrections of the year >> more

Is art blogging really that bad, asks Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times >> more

Michael Stipe's capsule line for Maison Martin Margiela >> more

Idi Amin and gallerist Robert Fraser had a sexual liaison? >> more

Italian anthropologists to run DNA tests on Caravaggio's exhumed remains >> more

Terranaut II: A fish-powered bicycle >> more

First time there will be live nudity at the MoMA >> more

Duke University Press publishes two-decade-old doctoral dissertation by S. Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother >> more

Switzerland bans minarets >> more

Was just debating this the other day: The fashion trends for which this decade will be remembered >> more

Bush's lawyer in Bush v. Gore leading Prop. 8 legal challenge >> more

Forty-six percent of people who own a fake designer handbag buy the real thing within two years: "People were becoming increasingly attached to the real brand even though they never possessed it at all." >> more

The Paradox of Choice, revisited >> more

Maybe this is why art matters: People are willing to pay a lot for it >> more

Should conservatives reappropriate the term "teabagger"? >> more

Gallery show opens at 1 p.m. today. At sundown, all the art will be set on fire >> more

What's the world's most-stolen artwork? >> more

PETA considered "domestic special-interest terrorist" organization by U.S. government >> more

"Eternal Sunshine": Drug wipes out single, specific memory in mice while keeping others intact >> more

Filler words such as "um" and "like" in different languages >> more

I can't believe I hadn't seen this before. A three-way tie on Jeopardy! >> more >> more

Corduroy skirts are a sin >> more

Coalition of artists files FOIA to reveal which songs were used to interrogate detainees: "Mohammed al Qahtani, the so-called twentieth hijacker, said that whenever he fell asleep, the guards would crank up Christina Aguilera" >> more

The two main types of lists, according to Umberto Eco: "etcetera" and "everything included" >> more

Most of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions come from sheep burps? >> more

While growing up on Catalina Island, D.'s mom used to feed pickles to the wild bison. Now, those bison's descendants are getting contraceptive injections >> more

Two butterflies are born on the space shuttle Atlantis >> more

Has sleepwalking ever been captured on tape? Why researchers know so little about people who kill in their sleep >> more

The BBC's artist reality TV competition premiered this week. I'm scared to watch >> more

Pope urges artists to make works that are beautiful >> more

Is Design Within Reach in trouble? >> more

Yemen will be first country to run out of water >> more

Galileo's fingers discovered in a jar >> more

S. A. Andrée's ill-fated balloon journey to the North Pole >> more

How to choose a pen name >> more

Do assassinations matter? An analysis of all 298 assassination attempts from 1875 to 2004 and their political repercussions >> more

Creating the signage that will warn future generations about toxic waste dump sites: "There will always be someone who studies ancient languages." >> more >> more

Make your own Sriracha hot sauce >> more

The importance of a museum's permanent collection >> more

"Two Month's Salary" >> more

The two humanistic enterprises that most loudly declare their commitment to truth are barely on speaking terms. Why we need a Philosophy of Journalism >> more

Jeanne-Claude, dead at 74 >> more Daul Kim, dead at 20 >> more

Is there such a thing as a publicly owned image? Or are there only not-yet copyrighted images? >> more

President of Ultimate Fighting Championship becomes first head of major sports league to welcome openly gay athletes >> more

Discontinued McDonald's menu items, including corndogs and the Jason Kidd burger >> more

Morehouse College dress code bans men from wearing "clothing usually worn by women" >> more

Is Call of Duty 2 an anti-war game? >> more

TSA bans snowglobes in carry-on luggage >> more

Naming an aesthetic: "Modern Hemingway" or "New Antiquarian" or "Haute Americana"? >> more

An ongoing, eight-decade science experiment, unseen by anyone: "It took eight years for the first drop to fall." >> more

The 15 Fortune 500 companies run by women >> more

Revisiting the death of the American Dream >> more

Instead of a communal water font, machines that dispense single servings of holy water >> more

I ate my first mangosteen last month. I'm drinking bilberry tea right now. Next up: paw paw gelato >> more

The quest to create a new, rational language, absent redundancies and irregularities >> more

Top 200 artists of the 20th century to now, according to an online poll >> more

Paleontologists made stew from the neck of an extinct steppe bison that had been frozen for 36,000 years >> more

Mars Rover is stuck in a pit. "The choice on which way to drive will not be made lightly." >> more

Finally, a decent newspaper in San Francisco? Too bad the San Francisco Panorama is a one-off >> more

Twenty least powerful people in the art world. Rosalind Krauss makes the cut: "We couldn't remember who she is and we were too lazy to Google her." >> more

Claude Levi-Strauss is dead >> more

The weirdest people in the world? Great academic paper topic I can't believe hasn't been covered before >> more

Ron Artest raps about violence against women in Afghanistan, seriously >> more

Anti-rape condom >> more

Meatless Mondays in Baltimore's public schools has drawn ire from something called Pork Magazine >> more

Yale University Press refuses to publish controversial Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons in book about the controversy >> more

Economics experiment demonstrates benefits of backstabbing >> more

Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled $8,397 in F. Scott Fitzgerald's lifetime >> more

"No Woman No Cry": Does this lyric mean "There is no woman that does not cry" or "Don't cry if you don't have a woman"? A philologist weighs in >> more

Is there really no word to describe the person at whom a stare is directed? >> more

Slavoj Zizek lecture on new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, interrupted by bomb threat >> more

Editor of WaPo says he "failed to reconcile language with intentions." >> more

Tom Cruise was Christian Bale's inspiration for Patrick Bateman in 'American Psycho' >> more

ACLU considers destroying tapes of board meetings, claiming verbatim recordings are "working papers" not official record >> more

Most popular submission titles to Virginia Quarterly Review more

Genocide in Iraq against homosexual men and boys, who are publicly tortured, mutilated and killed >> more