[Skeptical Inquirer]
The first wisdom of critical thinking: things are not always entirely what they seem.

[TCS Daily]
In the mid-1980s, India's middle class comprised just 10 percent of the population. Today, it's larger than the entire population of the United States and is predicted to grow to 445 million by the end of this decade.

[Austin American-Statesman]
Car window dust art.

[The Huffington Post]
"Religion Is Incredibly Dumb" music video.

[Discovery Channel]
Are cultural pressures creating rampant "psychological neoteny?" University of Newcastle professor Bruce Charlton believes that a "child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge" is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are "unfinished." Since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, "immature" people tend to thrive and succeed and have set the tone for contemporary life. The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues. These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness.

[Council for Secular Humanism]
Paul Kurtz: Why I Am a Skeptic about Religious Claims.

[BBC News]
The word "time" is the most common noun in the English language, according to the latest Oxford dictionary. The thing that struck me when I put together this list was that 90% of the top 100 words were one syllable, and that a large proportion were actually from Old English, meaning the basic words we use all the time in basic sentences are from before the Norman Conquest.

[wesjones.com]
John Taylor Gatto: Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?

[Reuters]
An 82-year-old Austrian looter of ancient artifacts reveals a tomb outside Rome that contains frescoes which archeologists say may be 2,700 years old.

[CNN]
Superman Returns: Is this a new Superman for the new Evangelist red state America? Superman as Jesus?

[Concord Monitor]
Donald Hall is named Poet Laureate of the United States.

[Turn Here]
Professional digital videos which convey authentic experiences of places and leisure activities in cities and neighborhoods around the world, intended to assist both travelers and locals in exploring cities, neighborhoods and destinations. Each film is driven by an individual filmmaker’s vision, translated into compelling storytelling, engaging narrators, insider perspective and high entertainment value.

[ManyBooks.net]
13,941 free ebooks.

[LewRockwell.com]
In the language of chaos theory, America—if not all of Western civilization—is in a state of turbulence of such intensity that efforts to restore order by recourse to traditional systems and policies will be to no avail.

How did an America of H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, James J. Hill, Henry David Thoreau, and Anne Hutchinson, manage to become a nation of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Halliburton, and Condoleezza Rice? How did the spiritual voice of a Ralph Waldo Emerson get replaced by Pat Robertson?

[UCSD News]
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time. Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans—a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind—the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

[The Wall Street Journal]
But who will set the record for documenting the most records?

[New York Times]
The product placement deal makes the leap from film to books.

[Sydney Morning Herald]
Interesting contrast between men and women's favorite books.

[Times Online]
Sections of the King’s Table, a symbol of royal power until it was smashed by Oliver Cromwell, have been found beneath the floor of the Palace of Westminster. The elaborately carved stone table was used by kings and queens from the 13th century for coronation feasts and state banquets but disappeared under Puritan rule.

[Steven Dutch page]
Steven Dutch argues that humans are not, in fact, innately curious and creative.

[Pudding House Publications]
Poem "To Choose," with watercolors [Flash].

[Oldpoetry]
Learn from the poetic wisdom of the ages, with 6244 poets and 53,773 poems.

[rogerebert.com]
Roger Ebert: In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film.

[The Library of Congress]
Poetry 180: a poem a day for American high schools.