[Yahoo! News]
The new Dixie Chicks album, Taking The Long Way, debuts at #1 on Billboard Top 200.

[Slate]
David Plotz blogs the Bible.

[LookAtEntertainment.com]
Transformation art by Hungarian artist Ferenc Cakó, using sand and a projector.

[BBC News]
Is The Simpsons the perfect vehicle for real modern philosophy?

[WineLog]
Easy-to-use wine recommendation and tracking site.

[Slate]
Various writers reveal their favorite "beach books."

[BBC News]
The mysterious "London stone," mentioned by Shakespeare, Blake and Dickens, is going to be rescued from a building due to be demolished. Does it mean that London is going to be saved from an ancient legend?

[The New York Public Library]
A complete list of the titles included in the exhibition Books of the Century at the New York Public Library's Center for the Humanities, May 20, 1995-July 13, 1996, and in The New York Public Library's Books of the Century, published by Oxford University Press.

[New York Times]
Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Here are the results.

[RSA Journal]
What's really important, then, cultures or people? The right approach starts by taking individuals—not nations, tribes or "people"—as the proper object of moral concern. It doesn't much matter what we call such a creed, but in homage to Diogenes, the fourth-century Greek Cynic and the first philosopher to call himself a "citizen of the world," we could call it cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitans take cultural difference seriously, because they take choices individuals make seriously. But because difference is not the only thing that concerns them, they suspect that many of globalisation's cultural critics are aiming at the wrong targets. Yes, globalisation can produce homogeneity. But globalisation is also a threat to homogeneity.

If we want to preserve a wide range of human conditions because it allows free people the best chance to make their own lives, we can’t enforce diversity by trapping people within differences they long to escape. Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.

[New York Times]
The library of libraries: From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages.

[New York Times]
The recent trend of "happiness research" continues, making the same claim: Because of logic-processing errors our brains tend to make, we don't want the things that would make us happy—and the things that we want (more money, say, or a bigger house or a fancier car) won't make us happy.

[The Raw Story]
Let's compromise. The liberal religious find our disbelief objectionable and uncomfortable. We atheists find their beliefs in the unseen and untestable silly and baseless. We can agree to detest each other's ideas about faith and an afterlife, and even berate each other publicly for each other's beliefs while still finding common cause in improving the world here and now; while our motives may differ, we all want to protect civil liberties, fight for economic equality, oppose the war, promote conservation and renewable energies, fund education and science, and even oppose religious discrimination.

[CBS News]
Colombian-American singer Soraya, who won a Latin Grammy for best female album in 2004 and worked to educate Hispanic women about breast cancer, has died after battling the disease. She was 37.

[Variety.com]
This is the dirty little secret cable news would rather not discuss: Fox News Channel and CNN are two of only three leading basic networks (the other being the Hallmark Channel) whose median viewer age is over 60. Headline News rings in next at 59.9, and MSNBC is still on the rickety side at 57. The cable nets' older profiles have also yielded absurd exchanges about demographic superiority, such as the boast that more young adults view MSNBC's Keith Olbermann than CNN's Paula Zahn. Whichever midget is taller, the truth remains that the vast majority of young adults have no interest in either.

[Spiegel Online]
The language is created by the culture, says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. This carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past—limiting the language accordingly. The Pirahã don't appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: Everything is the same, things always are. The mothers also don't tell their children fairy tales—actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art.

[openDemocracy]
The scientific method, on which our modern technological civilisation rests, also appeared for contingent historical reasons at a certain moment in the history of early modern Europe, based on the thought of philosophers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes. But once the scientific method was invented, it became a possession for all of mankind, and was usable whether you were Asian, African, or Indian. The question is, therefore, whether the principles of liberty and equality that we see as the foundation of liberal democracy have a similar universal significance.

[Scotsman.com]
Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, says Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno.

[New York Times]
The mainstream (i.e., corporate) press just doesn't know what to do with Stephen Colbert's brutally honest, take-no-prisoners performance at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

Click here to judge for yourself.

[Yahoo! News]
The nation's largest beverage distributors have agreed to halt nearly all soda sales to public schools. The deal follows a wave of regulation by school districts and state legislatures to cut back on student consumption of soda amid reports of rising childhood obesity rates. Soda has been a particular target of those fighting obesity because of its caloric content and popularity among children.

[MLA.org]
Language maps of linguistic distribution in the United States.

[New York Times]
William Logan reviews the new Oxford Book of American Poetry.

[Poetry]
Kay Ryan: Nonsense exists only in relation to sense. It uses the rules of sense but comes to different conclusions. All feelings must go through the chillifier for us to feel them in that aesthetically thrilling way that we do in poetry. Poetry’s feelings are not human feelings; we know the difference. There is some deep exchange of heat for cool that I’m trying to get at, something that I see operating in nonsense and that I believe gives poetry much of its secret irresistibility and staying-power...

[mysterywriters.org]
The Mystery Writers of America announce the winners of the 2006 Edgar Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television and film published or produced in 2005.

[Times Online]
John Humphreys, the creator of Max Headroom who has also worked on special effects for Doctor Who, admits he was one of the hoaxers behind the Roswell film, the grainy black and white footage supposedly showing a dead alien being dissected by American government scientists after a UFO crash.

[ScienceDaily]
In cooperation with an international team of scholars, UCLA is launching the world's first comprehensive online encyclopedia dedicated to all aspects of ancient Egypt and its legacy. Over the next decade, hundreds of scholars are expected to contribute to the constantly evolving and peer-reviewed UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (UEE). This year alone there already have been four major discoveries that have significantly changed how we interpret ancient Egyptian history, religion and life.

[Rushkoff.com]
Douglas Rushkoff: Like any other public health crisis, the belief in religion must now be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation's ability to behave in a rational way, and—given our weapons capabilities—posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the world.