[The Chronicle]
For thousands of years, people have been proclaiming a crisis in marriage and pointing backward to better days. The ancient Greeks complained bitterly about the declining morals of wives. The Romans bemoaned high divorce rates. The European settlers in America began lamenting the decline of the family and the disobedience of women and children almost as soon as they stepped off the boats.

[Guardian Unlimited]
Salman Rushdie considers "facts" and biases.

[Slate]
Skeptics faced with new challenges in regressive 21st century America.

[jcbsong.co.uk]
British music video with very cool animation.

[The Daily Telegraph]
French magazine demonstrates technique which may be that used to create the Shroud of Turin hoax.

[Free Press News]
Bill Moyers on the attack on public television.

[Christian Science Monitor]
Another nail in the coffin of broadcast radio: "oldies" format stations being done away with across the country.

[Corvallis Gazette-Times]
U.S. has more religious zealots than other nations.

[Milk and Cookies]
Soon after the movie Seven came out, the MTV Movie Awards got William Shatner to do this parody. He plays the lead roles as each of his more famous characters: Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, and himself as the host of Rescue 911.

[Eye Weekly]
A response to the recent right-wing "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries" list: And people who think books are harmful tend to be the most harmful people of all.

[The Independent]
Archaeologists have discovered Europe's oldest civilisation, a network of dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids. More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000 years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC.

[Times Online]
British explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell has found an early submarine (built in 1864) that he believes was the inspiration for Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s vessel in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.

[Poetry]
Christina Pugh contemplates the proper role of "experience" in poetry: Might it be that what is missing in the work of some younger poets is not "experience" at all, but reading that is deep enough to effect changes in the self?...What's missing in much of the work I see is an ability to distinguish experience from occasion...

[news.scotsman.com]
Natural selection doesn't care about our happiness, says Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University. It just wants us alive and making babies, miserably if need be...It is quite possible that people [are] so preoccupied with wanting things that they forget to do the things they enjoy.

[Toronto Star]
Salmon Rushdie sneers at Dylan Evans' "Athiesm Lite" nonsense.