[Guardian Unlimited]
The Poetry Archive celebrated its first anniversary today, unveiling on its website a selection of newly-recovered historic recordings of poets.

[The Christian Science Monitor]
There's a belief in some circles that history is a branch of science, that there is some sort of objective truth out there that can be parceled out, inventoried—and, most important, assessed by the ultimate guardian of truth, the school exam. Nonsense. History is poetry—illusion, imagination, a whiff of what might have been as elusive as wood smoke on an October evening. Its delight lies in its fragility. You can sense it by visiting a place, by touching an ancient document. Or you can convey a sense of history by telling a good story. The words "history" and "story" come from the same root. In many languages, they are the very same word...our minds are geared for narrative.

[Poets & Writers]
A selection of debut poetry.

[The New York Times]
A community responds to their authoritarian lunatics with clarity, force, and good sense, sending them packing. Wait, in America??

[Uncyclopedia]
The Wikipedia of humor and kookiness.

[The Harvard Crimson]
Steven Pinker addresses Harvard University's new report on general education: The juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like “faith” and “reason” are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith—believing something without good reasons to do so—has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for “Astronomy and Astrology” or “Psychology and Parapsychology.” It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.

[The New York Times]
The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2006.

[Technovelgy]
Explore or add to this list of over 1125 inventions and ideas of science fiction writers.

[USA Today]
Another rare interview: Gary Larson.

[ABC News]
U.S. education problem grows worse: A recent study by the Department of Education found that 31 percent of American students were dropping out or failing to graduate in the nation's largest 100 public school districts.

[Guardian Unlimited]
New (and extremely rare) interview with Robert Pirsig.

[onegoodmove]
Australian filmmaker John Safran vs. The Mormons. Payback is hell.

[Robert Grudin homepage]
Cross-disciplinary perspective has to become the benchmark for 21st-century thinking. The emerging social, technological and environmental challenges of our times are too multifarious to be solved by mono-disciplinary textbooks. They must be addressed by minds that can move agilely through multiple fields and perspectives. They call for a vision that can tempt chaos to achieve a new synthesis.

[RichardDawkins.net]
Richard Dawkins: I'm an atheist, BUT...

[Guardian Unlimited]
Adrienne Rich on the continued relevance of poetry in our world.

[The National Book Foundation]
The 2006 National Book Award winners.

[Guardian Unlimited]
We understand that the faithful live in an inspissated gloaming of incense and obfuscation, through the swirls of which it is hard to see anything clearly, so a simple lesson in semantics might help to clear the air for them on the meanings of "secular", "humanist" and "atheist". Once they have succeeded in understanding these terms they will grasp that none of them imply "faith" in anything, and that it is not possible to be a "fundamentalist" with respect to any of them.

People who do not believe in supernatural entities do not have a "faith" in "the non-existence of X" (where X is "fairies" or "goblins" or "gods"); what they have is a reliance on reason and observation, and a concomitant preparedness to accept the judgment of both on the principles and theories that premise their actions. The views they take about things are proportional to the evidence supporting them, and are always subject to change in the light of new or better evidence.

[The New York Times]
In its early days, the Oxford English Dictionary found words almost exclusively in books; it was a record of the formal written language. No longer. The language upon which the lexicographers eavesdrop is larger, wilder and more amorphous; it is a great, swirling, expanding cloud of messaging and speech: newspapers, magazines, pamphlets; menus and business memos; Internet news groups and chat-room conversations; and television and radio broadcasts.

[multiple]
Are you tone deaf? Are you Mozart? Test your musical ability here and here.

[Spiked]
Why is academic freedom important? Because in order to think, in order to exercise your freedom, you need to be educated—and in order for people to be educated they need to have the freedom to consider a very wide range of ideas, to have their own preconceptions questioned, and questioned vigorously. They have to learn how to tolerate ideas that are really abhorrent to them. They need to learn the difference between ideas and actions. They need to learn that people can have very different ideas, and they can debate them without coming to blows.

[UPI]
The FCC has ruled that profanities can be used in news interviews but not on awards shows or in fictional shows.

[Spiked]
Promoting a consistent belief in human potential underpins progressive thought. A human-centred worldview recognises, of course, that people can be destructive and that conflicts of interests can have devastating outcomes. However, the negative and sometimes horrific experiences of the past two centuries, up to and including the Holocaust, are not the price of progress but of the lack of progress. Contemporary problems are not the result of applying reason, science and knowledge, but of neglecting them and thwarting the human potential.

[ars technica]
New report says knowledge should be considered a public resource first, and a private asset second.

[The Belfast Telegraph Digital]
Michael Longley: I think one of the hardest things to do in any of the arts is to be simple. It is much easier to be complicated and obscure, especially if you haven't thought things out and expressed yourself honestly.

[personal page]
Make your dollars godless!

[ars technica]
Viacom/Comedy Central blinks: Agrees to allow show clips to be posted on YouTube again.

[National Review Online]
John Derbyshire on losing his faith.