[Fimoculous]
Lists for 2005.

[electricstory.com]
Lucius Shepard writes the best review of King Kong, getting it exactly right: Jackson, once an edgy, intriguing filmmaker, has fallen prey to the same ethos that underscores the films of his immediate predecessors, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas: To make a mark, a movie must play as though to an audience of children...and not especially astute children at that.

[news.telegraph]
Rogue morticians in Brooklyn cut Alastair Cooke's bones from his body after death and sold them for transplants.

[Yahoo! News]
Dover, PA-area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, rules U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III.

[beliefnet]
Who wants to believe a lie?

[The Times Online]
This is the question of our time: how does a fractured community of multiple cultures decide what values it must share in order to cohere, and how can it insist on those values even when they clash with some citizens’ traditions and beliefs?

[International Herald Tribune]
Christmas's self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack. But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.

[Guardian Unlimited]
Of Narnia, reviewer says: Children won't get the Christian subtext, but unbelievers should keep a sickbag handy during Disney's new epic.

[The New York Times]
Intelligent Design already being shown the door? On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research. "They never came in."

[Wired News]
Why post-9/11 airline security measures are ineffectual, dangerous, and, quite possibly, a scam.

[University of Chicago Press Online]
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing)...You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.