[LoudLit.org]
LoudLit.org is committed to delivering public domain literature paired with high quality audio performances. We pair together great literature and accompanying audio.

[The Universal Digital Library]
The mission is to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.

[Newsweek]
New immigrants may be the best thing that ever happened to American cities, but don't wait for the leading presidential candidates to tell you that.

[Krismas.org]
Merry Krismas!

[Telegraph.co.uk]
A Doctor Who story for Christmas.

[R/GA]
Tattoo Santa.

[Guardian Unlimited]
There's something fishy about any argument that begins from the position that poetry, which has been created and shared for millennia, depends for its flourishing on the strict application of copyright law (which dates, in any recognisable form, only to 1709)...all the evidence of the online era suggests that getting tough on copyright infringement and trying to build legal walls in cyberspace certainly doesn't work. Above all, it just seems highly unlikely that the healthy future of poetry rests in trying to stifle and suppress, rather than to encourage, the centuries-old urge to share lines of verse that move or delight us.

[Poetry Foundation]
Creative writing courses to get a bit less creative.

[cbc.ca]
The Paris Opera and National Library will display two sealed urns containing recordings by opera greats of the early 1900s such as Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso. On Dec. 24, 1907, in an effort to preserve the leading voices of the era, the urns were buried in the basement of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris with the stipulation that they not be opened for 100 years "so men of that epoch can hear what the leading voices of our time sounded like." The recordings won't be extracted until some time in 2008.

[The New York Times]
The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office shows.

[mattbors.com]
World History with the Pope. [comic]

[Guardian Unlimited]
2007 Nobel Prize acceptance speech by Doris Lessing, 88: The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise...but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us—for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

[The New York Times]
The New York Times Magazine's 70 "big ideas" of 2007.

[RichardDawkins.net]
Stephen Fry: Merry Mithras. [video]

[More Intelligent Life]
Website for an interesting-looking European lifestyle magazine: With spirited writing and bold design, it covers an eclectic range of issues from travel and the arts to fashion and philanthropy. With distinguished writers from around the world and evocative photography commissioned for each issue, Intelligent Life is a dynamic new environment for readers and advertisers alike.

[Rolling Stone]
How America lost the "War on Drugs."

[Online Games]
Top 10 point and click games based on graphics, difficulty level and overall enjoyable gaming experience.

[Read/WriteWeb]
A big list of sites that teach you how to do stuff.

[Reuters]
More Americans believe in a literal hell and the devil than Darwin's theory of evolution, according to a new Harris poll. In addition, substantial minorities in America apparently believe in ghosts, UFOs, witches, astrology and reincarnation.